“... in defiance of his Sidenius heritage. Challenged by his ‘own soul’ to ‘renew his search for self-awareness’, Per gradually loses interest in the sunny but superficial Nanny, and turns to her older, quieter, ‘frightfully scrawny’ sister, Jakobe. Jakobe is as troubled as Nanny is carefree, aware of the antisemitism around her, already disappointed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Christian name was Matthew and his middle one was Thomas. Towards the end he commented that by his-self he’d made a sixth of the disciples, and forgone a life on the quest for the rest. And a good book. Or a decent cause. fear Laird Jnr was a tyke, a terrier. A nit-picker who grew to a hair-splitter, he was not so much scared of his shadow, as of its ...”

“... and reassert ourselves, rejecting those foreign bodies as we sharpen and restore our sense of self’. But perhaps the sense of self is never sufficient, the roles never so secure as with Mavis and the Colonel. Perhaps what is missing is simply religious faith – which the Irish, always having had more of, always miss ...”

“... Idly turning over the stacks, I unguardedly exclaimed: ‘Golly. A whole big thing on Jewish self-hatred,’ ‘And that’s only volume one!’ he returned, fighting to control the look of wolfish conceit at such an easy score. I cursed inwardly. And now here is my revenge, ready to hand. In Lost Property, Ben does his best to get his truest friends to ...”

“... unloving wife because of their damaged youngest daughter. Davis meets the girl, an echo of her old self, when she returns to Jaquith’s facility, and effectively adopts her. This makes her Henreid’s wife in spirit without his getting a divorce. This is what she means by their having the stars. Henreid isn’t thrilled but knows he mustn’t argue. Davis ...”

“... mind is almost its own subject, where the place of narrative or character is mostly taken by the self-conscious or self-delighting mind, and where you yourself are put in mind of the quivery automatic graph-paper machines that register earthquakes or the humidity in museums (seismometers or hygrometers), is demanding to ...”

“... of the hang exactly as he arranged it in 1932. The bearded, pale, emaciated young artist in a self-portrait of 1901 looks down on a selection of portraits of his family: his future wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, in a painting from 1917, surrounded by images of their son, Paul, from the 1920s. On the opposite wall, three works hung together ...”

“... interiority. In Zidane, the relentless scrutiny of his face yields little in the way of an inner self, still less anything that would help us to account for his sublime skill. We feel for him, but do not identify with him; he is alone, lonely even, and distant, other. Gordon’s film wouldn’t have been given a cinema release – his work is normally shown ...”

“... he has not remarried and his daughter is now merely the old maid who puts up with his drunken self-pity and barked commands. Our hero, Hirayama, played by Chishû Ryû, is being nagged by his friend to avoid this fate, and above all avoid this fate for his daughter; and he does, but he takes a long time to come to his decision, he doesn’t have any ...”

“... at large; yet sometimes too it seems to come from within. Here Sherman shows her subjects to be self-surveyed, but in a mode less of narcissistic absorption than of psychological estrangement. Thus in the distance between made-up woman and her mirrored face in Untitled Film Still #2 (1977), Sherman points to the gap between the imagined and actual ...”

“... they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?’ A claim to fame, a piece of flattery, grounds for self-congratulation, a temporising tactic, and an instance of absurd life imitating absurd art: this is a lot of work for a single phrase to do, yet none of it encompasses or even looks at the meaning of the phrase. The camps just flicker there in the ...”

“... that the archives in Istanbul have been opening up. Among the Turkish public at large, the old self-pitying, self-heroising patriotic myths remain entrenched. Popular literature and school textbooks paint a very misleading picture of what happened and help foment the sort of extremism that led to the murder of the ...”