“... leaving Wittenberg for a court grown purulent? He found himself unemployed, at best the self-appointed professional mourner. Offstage, Poland is racked with unrest. Four centuries later, Andrzej Wajda films Hamlet in gabled Cracow, where Faust (real and imagined) plied his dreadful trade; His legend, Hamlet’s, Bruno’s and that of Poland lives ...”

“... us. Something says nonstopare you hereare your ancestorsreal do you have abody do you haveyr self inmind can you see yrhands – have you broken itthe thread – try to feel thepull of the otherend – make sureboth ends arealive when u pull totry to re-enterhere. A ravenhas arrived while Iam taking all thisdown. In-corporate me itsquawks. It hopscloser ...”

“... too non-specific for relevance. It was November when I made these notes, then in absentminded self-disgust set out on the path from Crail, and by sunset, at four, could neither return nor make Kingsbarns before dark. Though no one knew where I was, real danger lay elsewhere. No cows even. Just sleepless fields staring skyward and the firth prowling ...”

“... the greatest compliment anyone could give me’ – and it appears that in most respects Gould was self-taught.Despite his gifts, Gould wasn’t pushed as a child prodigy. His first serious concert engagement came in 1947, when, at the age of 14, he was asked to play Beethoven’s G major Concerto with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. It is typical of the way ...”

“... a drama not between generations, or between opinions, but within a wounded, deceived or conflicted self. The presence of a mother would breach the essential privacy of the emerging self, the uncertain moral consciousness on which the novel comes to depend. The conspiracy in the novel is not between a mother and her ...”

“... I’ve been collecting the stuff, fairly omnivorously, the past five or six years, but always with self-doubt and a certain ethical uneasiness. Go away a little closer, Idiot Boy. I’ve got all the recent books on the subject. But reading books – and there have been droves over the past decade – seems only to deepen the confusion. Witness Create, a glossy ...”

“... of Buddha) together define the breadth of the perceived cultural malaise and the role of self-conscious primitivism as plasma: ‘self-conscious’ because it was the product of educated, independent, ego-driven artistic choice rather than a selfless village artisan’s efforts to meet the religious/ceremonial ...”

“... four inches high. ‘Glad you could make it. Glad in more ways than one,’ said Martin in his self-consciously deep voice. ‘Usually I drop down to the floor on a thread of cotton at about this time and start for the kitchen in the hope of getting a drink by dusk. But I’ve lost the thread. Lost the thread in more ways than one, I thought, Martin, old ...”

“... height of the neo-Jacobitism [sic], a Romantic-Decadent movement which reacted against cynical and self-interested influences in … contemporary politics’. No wonder it was still going. From Wikipedia I learned that it was one of the less militant groups to have revered the martyr-king at that time: in 1893, a ‘considerable detachment of police’, sent ...”

“... and some financial support to vendors. The Foundation, it says, ‘reflects the principle of self-help which governs the magazine’: think AA. John Bird says: ‘The Big Issue Foundation aims to help these people regain the dignity of independence. Self-esteem. Independence. It’s all good stuff.’ Very much the ...”

“... of publication at the beginning of September. Her pain levels are out of control; rage, jealousy, self-pity, self-flattery and malice are the indices, on every page. This isn’t a book so much as a casualty struggling to rise to its feet but disabled by the fury of its author. François Hollande is the target: he was ...”

“... and designed in one. ‘My Marilyn’ (1965). Hamilton explored the new relay between self and image directly in his own version of the ultimate Pop icon, Marilyn Monroe, made after his first visit to the United States in 1963, where he travelled with his friend Marcel Duchamp, and met Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and other young bucks ...”

“... Balefulness was his forte, and a score of shades of desperation and fury are evoked by the self-portrait canvases on view in Tate Modern, from the surly teenager of 1882 to the withered streak of personal persistence stood ‘between the clock and the bed’ a year or two before his death. The curators rather skew their fascinating revisionist exercise ...”

“... figures. ‘Plamen was a light showing us a way forward,’ Dimitar Dimitrov, who survived his own self-immolation attempt on 13 March, told me when I visited him at his wife’s cabin in the rural region of Silistra, where he is convalescing. ‘The thing that surprised me most was that the pain hit me instantly,’ Dimitrov said, remembering the day when he ...”

“... the power of Munch’s Scream embedded in a singing birthday card. All this is in the name of ‘self-evident common sense’ (always a worrying claim) for which she is the self-ordained champion. Scientism has attempted to mystify the common sense that belongs to ‘ordinary people’. The intelligentsia, who are ...”