“... 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 ...”

“... of the impossible. This film is a story of a woman in a man’s world. Chastain is too tight and self-contained for anyone to feel sorry for her, and she certainly doesn’t feel sorry for herself. When she is first allowed to attend a meeting with Gandolfini – that is, to sit off at some distance in the same room with him – she answers his ...”

“... Michael Douglas as Liberace acts up onstage and off, twinkles with a coy kindness that is all self-admiration but quite fetching even so; Damon is bewildered and wary and captivated in just the right proportions, and his shift from baffled gay guy into trinketed and tinted toy boy is beautifully done. Both actors, throughout the movie, manage to hang on ...”

“... He sees the gap between what he is saying and what he pretends to be saying. His irony affords no self-criticism, but it is full of leering self-awareness. The film has none of this, no contrition or glee or reflection, and in certain respects it is remarkably austere. This is in large part why viewers’ reactions have ...”

“... from 1937, eventually precipitating a clash with the US. For conservatives, the war of national self-defence began in December 1941 when Japan, suffering terribly under American sanctions, fought back by launching an attack on Pearl Harbor. On 14 August, in a statement to mark the 70th anniversary of surrender, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe surprised nobody but ...”