“... decide, in the end, to take her advice and forget it. As she turns to favour you with that self-same rose, you might notice how her shoulder blades jut and curve like the folded wings of an angel, how she smells very slightly of civet, how her nose is off-true, as if she had once been the victim of a random attack, how the dark of her eye can bring you ...”

“... and carer.The other gods perfect themselves; they choose          their fearsome or awesome self-presentationin detail – whether beautiful or sublime,          violet-lidded, or plaited, or shining hair loose –when they face a congregation.          She can’t, or won’t. She doesn’t have the time.(Aetia, II/48)Zeus (I read here) once ...”

“... of what we say inside and outside philosophy is strictly meaningless. But there is pleasure in self-denial, especially when it involves sweeping away the results of other people’s self-indulgence. Anyway, the book is written with such spirit and dash, that, though it is an attempt to limit our minds, it is ...”

“... as he is to opponents whom his antics put off their stroke? McEnroe is a perfectionist, and self-hatred and self-castigation are the obverse side of his perfectionism. Evans tells us that most of his bad language on court is directed against himself, even though some obtuse umpires don’t realise it. At Wimbledon in ...”

“... main plot of Rotten Borough centres on the efforts of Bellairs and his associates to unmask the self-righteous municipal dignitaries who use the Town Council as a mere sub-committee of the Board of Commerce, which is the seat of their power. They include a strict Nonconformist mayor with epicurean tastes and aspirations to knighthood, a ...”

“... life and runs away with what there is of it. She was a great aristocratic beauty; her vanity and self-absorption were monumental; and she smothered her sons with the kind of love that has to be instantly and demonstratively returned with knobs on. When her eldest son was killed in the First World War, she turned to Spiritualism. She was horrid to her ...”

“... and worse in the emptinesses of land or sea: it smacks too much of masochism, exhibitionism or self-indulgence, and none of us likes to be caught out in any of these. Of her own wandering for several months across the Outback of her native Australia, Robyn Davidson says: ‘The lunatic idea was, basically, to get myself the requisite number of wild camels ...”

“... have regretted, but which nevertheless coloured his attitude to life. How much it contributed to self-knowledge is debatable, or so one might think in the light of one intriguing anecdote included in this book. It appears that on a visit to Maugham H.G. Wells drew his fingers along the edition of his complete works that he had presented to his fellow ...”

“... was worth and how many pennies he ought to get. This practicality saved him from the seductive self-indulgence of extremism. ‘That extremism in general stands for purity and courage is a species of self-delusion practised by the ego on itself a’ for its glory. Division has been Scotland’s arch-fiend and has always ...”

“... in Sam Johnson’s verse: ‘the lexicographer’s weighing of the epithet’. And of course the self-educated rector of Winterbourne Came, author of A Philological Grammar and An Anglo-Saxon Delectus, was himself a lexicographer, as his sort of philologist has to be. However, this poem, ‘Moss’, is from Poems Partly of Rural Life in National English ...”

“... change the past or forestall impending danger. ‘Dear Comrade of the Boarding House’ starts as self-description: ‘This is the poem in which your jeep does not crash,’ or ‘this poem is the hospital in which you are healed,’ or this is the poem in which the dead friend does ‘not crawl back to me night after night for fifteen years/returned but ...”

“... much, just more fulsomely admired than he is now. He is not very mature about this; apt to cry in self-pity, drink too much and throw objects at the mirror image of his failed self. In one of the film’s several great scenes he meets an agent, Marvin Schwarz, fabulously hammed up by Al Pacino, who explains to him that ...”

“... onto walls, scuffed at the edges, the paint chipped or marked.The arrangement is flanked by two self-portraits, painted in 1958 and 1972. Gilmore is self-lacerating in both, detailing her wrinkles, the bags under her eyes, her furrowed brow. In the earlier painting she cuts an elegant figure, in diamond earrings and a ...”

“... and finally in his own (he does later admit to his departure), must first collapse into a weeping, self-accusing heap and then get a second chance: not to prove his courage but to hoist the masculinity myth back into place. He rescues Ebba in the snow (even if he does have to abandon the children to do it), and sympathises with her when she too becomes afraid ...”

“... a Church (c.1905) to the Klimt-esque Shroud of Christ (1908); from the sensuous fluidity of the Self-Portrait (1908-10), which would recall Gauguin were it not for Malevich’s unmistakeable blunt stare, to the green-grey tones – Malevich later called it ‘Cézannism’ – of Landscape (1911). The succession of idioms is striking for its speed: months ...”