“... the stout middle-aged Millais can’t be dismissed as a bloated parody of his earlier skinnier self. Probably no career, on extended examination, could turn on quite such simple axes. In fact they show that the later manner represents an expansion of the artist’s reach. The Pre-Raphaelite Mariana is the sum of its parts, an interior sustained by ...”

“... expect it to go away soon. They are often right: most community-acquired intestinal infections are self-limiting and get better more quickly if left untreated. This is true even for E. coli O157. Taking antibiotics or antispasmodics is thought to increase the risk of developing the complications of kidney failure, brain damage and cardiac death. But ...”

“... to breakfast should never pass, in a man’s heart, for a homecoming.’ This is a portrait of self-pity that believes it is a portrait of self-laceration. But it isn’t: it’s just a portrait of self-pity. The night Mendel Shpilman was murdered, he had been playing chess: ‘It ...”

“... middle of fucking nowhere’, they’re under the control of three men: the vicious Boncer, the self-absorbed Teddy and the Godot-like Hardings who never shows up. In The Weekend (2019) the group is composed of three women in their seventies who spend Christmas at the beach house of their friend Sylvie, who died a year before. Lost without her, they ...”

“... becomes a little shadow of itself’. This touched-up portrait requires a darkening of Humbert’s self-portrait: ‘it was always my habit and method,’ he admits, ‘to ignore Lolita’s states of mind while comforting my own base self.’ ‘Dolores Haze,’ he avers ...”

“... designs or marketing. Seeking a change of publisher was less like a fresh start than a sort of self-sabotage, since it risked the new book being separated from his back catalogue, especially damaging in the case of a trilogy. The Information was published by Flamingo in 1995, but Amis was back with Cape for Night Train in 1997 and has stayed there ...”

“... the impression that she was herself present only as an observer. One guesses that she was both self-effacing and voluble, throwing up verbal screens to protect herself from exposure. In the new volume of her diary we can read about a holiday in Cassis where she and Leonard had stayed at a hotel with several other English people. The hotel exhibited ‘such ...”

“... puppets, cakes, bandanas’.Some of these things surely belong to pre-existing categories such as self-expression, personal style, craft or community ethos. A smart new haircut obviously isn’t art, if art is also Rembrandt and Sylvia Plath and Stockhausen. Not all art has to be dark or difficult or epic or anguished; as Eno said in his Turner Prize lecture ...”

“... like most Indian men he preferred to beat his wife or his children than assail himself with self-doubt – yet he had neither friends nor social outlets. He never went to the cinema, to restaurants, on holiday. He became, gradually, inevitably, trapped in his own private universe. As emotionally parsimonious as he had to be financially, he broke his ...”

“... Shakespeare gave him a right to have his final say on the subject. This notion I thought grossly self-indulgent. There seemed to be little reason to believe that at his age he could suddenly have found anything interesting to say. And there surely were enough books on Shakespeare already, many of them dull, many of them silly, without the addition of another ...”

“... was, however, an epoch of unprecedented epoch-mania. Nothing was allowed to be its own individual self; everything had to be interpreted in terms of what was typical for its time. A handful of nit-picking philosophers and pukka historians may have frowned their disapproval, but why should anyone care as long as the trade in periods and period styles was ...”

“... unsound, but it springs from something he knew about his own creativity. Yet his strength was not self-disclosure. Although he never subscribed to the Modernist cult of impersonality, he rejected the idea that poetry is self-expression and argued that even the lyric voice is dramatic. During the postwar years, when his ...”

“... go back home. Dad is so mean. There shouldn’t be a reason. Could there be a speck of my original self anywhere? – that I have left behind. God, and if I have forgotten about it, can it save ...”

“... Its first stanza chasing its own tail, Since no word will betray another word In this sodality, self-repressing and male, And we discover, hardly believing our eyes And ears, a sort of chromatic scale, That whatever lives and feels is logos. Tell us then, vanity, what is truth And how does it differ from honesty? Ecclesiastics and analysts play sleuth To ...”

“... in our minds such corrupt purity, never escaping but sinking into not the unthinkable gift of the self to death, not the sea flash flood in the throat, but into the oracle of the drowned; because the oracle of the dying comes to a halt but the oracle of the dead continues and has humour in it. We ask the dying, ‘How do you go about drowning?’ and the ...”