“... of Art, and on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris until 27 February, sweeps away the self-effacing acronyms. ‘I want to make myself available to myself,’ Mitchell explained to Sandler, as she described her intuitive process. She would begin by sketching charcoal forms onto unstretched canvas, then proceed to layer paint in her distinctive ...”

“... and protects the inner world of diaspora subjectivity, acting as a hollow shell that allows the self a contemplative space of melancholy in which to count its losses and hence come to terms with them’. There is a tension in what have we here? between what Mercer calls the ‘signifying indirection’ of Locke’s baroque and the straightforwardness of the ...”

“... you’re in the wrong movie. The illustration of the rule in the new film is Frank trying out a self-driving car that Cane has given him. He sits in the vehicle and says, ‘Go back thirty yards.’ The car does as it is told. Unfortunately, nobody tells it that it’s still linked to a pump at the petrol station and also connected to the wall of a ...”

“... as a poem that seems to speak, with heightened eloquence, to the reader’. For Prins, the ‘self-defacing’ logic of Fragment 31 – the poet’s tongue is ‘broken’, yet through the art of the translator, who reconstitutes and reorganises her scattered parts, we seem nonetheless to hear her ‘voice’ – haunts Sappho’s literary afterlife as ...”

“... That could only be done when men reformed themselves to do their duty to God, to neighbour and to self. More’s arguments, heavily salted with abuse after the manner of the time, are couched in Latin, so as to contain the dispute among those who could read that language: ‘Quid respondet frater, pater, potator?’ What answer from this crapulous father ...”

“... several, including Cecilia and Belinda, have significant relations to Clarissa; Mary Brunton’s Self-Control, from first chapter to last, constitutes a stage in the debate over seduction which, rightly or wrongly, always came back to Clarissa. It is plain that most interested women believed that Richardson had articulated the significant issues and laid ...”

“... is literally more narratological than those modern works we figuratively designate as self-conscious or reflexive: ‘Hearing himself refer to himself as Joe slapped him in the face with the realisation that this was not simply a similar scene, but the same scene he had lived through once before – save that he was living through it from a ...”

“... last stanza of ‘Water’ (1954) fuses priest and poet with a solemnity only faintly touched with self-mockery: I should raise in the east A glass of water Where any-angled light Would congregate endlessly. ‘Water’ and ‘High Windows’, written 13 years apart, are just alike enough in their endings to make their differences striking. The last lines of ...”

“... ideas seem blindingly simple. Republican nationalism is by tradition committed to the right of self-determination of the people of Ireland. Suppose, however, that the people of Ireland, in exercising this right, decide that they intend to enjoy full control over their island only when a majority of those living in that part of the island known as Northern ...”

“... Gilbert had let her know that he was reading her books on Emily. As his thin lips stretched to a self-satisfied smile, the long slits of his eyes narrowed. The effect was not altogether pleasant; his smile held an element of menace. And, right there, precisely when the reader might be tempted to roll her eyes, is a photograph of Cousin Gilbert, the long ...”

“... and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste. Open-minded, self-critical, conciliatory – it couldn’t last. Mailer’s later career wasn’t an exercise in dismantling the male ego. The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. I had ...”

“... must have written it. ‘The autistic mind, it was supposed at that time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and therefore of authentic introspection and retrospection,’ Sacks wrote. ‘How could an autistic person write an autobiography? It seemed a contradiction in terms.’ As late as 2001, the epidemiologist Walter ...”

“... want Hawa to be? What must she be, to satisfy his research demands? We associate marginality with self-consciousness, with the possibility of critical distance; the outsider becomes a sociologist. Yet Hawa cannot be placed: she is not outside or inside, or between; her position is shifting, and everything around her is shifting. It is all rather a puzzle; in ...”

“... had writhed under his satire and resented what they saw as his systematic undermining of German self-confidence, were enchanted. What a downfall to relish! He, too, the mighty novelist accepted by the outside world as Germany’s political conscience, had hidden his past. But there are many more Germans who had used those early novels – The Tin Drum, Cat ...”

“... sanity would follow. How the crucial sense that we were all trying to break free of a collective self-deception played out still puzzles me. Among people I knew after I left school, there was a buzzing convergence between those on the left, with clear-minded things to say about false consciousness, and those who had come down the winding road of the ...”