“... of Dutch art. In her book (and on its dust-jacket) there is a good colour illustration of a self-portrait and still-life painted by David Bailly of Leiden in 1651. A young artist (is it too ingenious to suggest that it represents Bailly himself as a young man?) holds Bailly’s portrait on a table where a wide variety of other works of art appear ...”

“... of structure which sometimes becomes merely lax. It may seem unfair to remark that there are self-indulgent passages of this kind in ‘Monday June 26th 1916’, since Strachey’s declared purpose there was to record the events of a single day, abjuring ‘selected realisms’ in the hope of capturing ‘its minuteness and its multiplicity and its ...”

“... a saint or cynic ever was    The theme of praise: a hermit would not miss Canonisation for the self-same cause,    And wherefore blame gaunt Wealth’s austerities? Because, you’ll say, nought calls for such a trial; Then there’s more merit in his self-denial. He is your only poet ... Perhaps. But during the ...”

“... Piers, whose identity exists to stage and shape that of others, finds his freedom from self in the dramatic energy of Vanbrugh, and so has the name nicked down to ‘Van’. The great house is sparsely populated by their great-grandfather, by his daughter-in-law (their grandmother), and by their pompous circumstantial uncle. Their widowed ...”

“... awareness among the other Chilean students of its psychological aftermath, makes Richard’s self-obsession seem rather pathetic, but Tóibín chooses not to offer the reader a moment even of denied awareness on his part. One section ends with a fellow student’s account of Raul’s torture: ‘He told them the names of his grandparents first, they were ...”

“... enthusiast for pretentious sentences and bogus science, and someone who whinged with unattractive self-absorption about the difficulty of writing anything, when no one was asking him to anyway. But what makes ‘Chatwin Revisited’ an honest homage and not just an assassination is its author’s unillusioned estimation, as a fellow travel-writer, of his own ...”

“... because the tales themselves can be fairly anodyne. Biff, bash, lolly, champagne, nick. Little self-reflection. Most criminals would think self-reflection was a design fault in a pair of Raybans. Reynolds has avoided these pitfalls because he has managed some self-reflection during his ...”

“... top five American titles (behind Mamba Mentality by Kobe Bryant and ahead of Burn after Writing, a self-help book composed of mostly blank pages with writing prompts meant to prevent oversharing on social media).The publishers bidding for American Dirt were responding to an ambient yearning for books and movies that combine popularity, commercial ...”

“... New Hampshiremen Robert Frost and e.e. cummings. Creeley’s work is characterised by a tortured self-examination, and an almost panicky need to engage with interior experience by enacting it syllable by syllable, as if any misstep will send the whole poem up in flames, and perhaps its maker too. This is the poem’s drama, and it hardly ever seems ...”

“... the government busy at work’. The mise-en-scène may be modest science fiction, but the mode is self-conscious post-Chandler noir. The narrator is Conrad Metcalf, a down-at-heel private eye – the ‘I’ in this case standing not for ‘investigator’ but ‘inquisitor’ – with low karma, less cash and an unhealthy make habit. His sex life has been ...”

“... rush of cinematic violence, but it’s driven by Arm’s turbulent inner life, a mix of tough-guy self-assurance and clumsy longing.Asked by an interviewer why all the stories in his first collection focused on young men, Barrett admitted it was ‘a limitation’. His new book shows his efforts to expand his range. Women are at the centre of a couple of the ...”

“... of a threatening natural space for a protective chapel ‘evokes sanctuary in a paradoxical, self-cancelling form’. The connection may seem far-fetched, but Gawain raises questions about the meaning of sanctuary vis-à-vis the natural world. Like the miracle of the stag, it asks whether human institutions such as kingship, covenant and sanctuary can ...”

“... and the Daily Mail were among the newspapers that used his services. In March this year, the self-confessed blagger turned whistleblower John Ford revealed the tactics he had used over a period of 15 years up to 2010 to obtain information illegally for newspapers; on one occasion he impersonated William Hague on the phone to get access to his bank ...”

“... about what not to include – if in doubt, toss it in – and parts of this book come across as self-indulgent. In the book’s second section, as Sean goes to high school, it’s not particularly surprising that he becomes what those around him have told him all along he is: a first-class fuck-up. Dede lobbies to send him to boarding-school and eventually ...”

“... twenty years or so have seen a more and more open acceptance of their place in the city. Soho’s self-branding in the 1990s as an urban ‘gay village’ has become one of the capital’s major selling points. On www.visitBritain.co.uk, ‘Gay London’ is promoted, somewhat bizarrely, as ‘the city of King Edward II, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Sir Ian ...”