“... seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.’ A tiny poem, ‘The Thin Man’, in Justice’s second collection, Night Light (1967), outlines a similar aesthetic credo: I indulge myself In rich refusals. Nothing suffices. I hone myself to This ...”

“... often featured her young sons, Hans and Peter, in her pictures of proletarian families. Searching self-portraits – Kollwitz produced more than a hundred in all media – also punctuate her oeuvre, which is meticulously surveyed in the current retrospective at MoMA (until 20 July). Largely self-taught as a ...”

“... alone cannot account for his eminence, however. Crumb is both an observant satirist and a self-aware student of his own drives. His grasp of American vernacular and his sardonic humour suggest a comparison with Mark Twain as well as with Twain’s admirer, the proudly prejudiced social critic H.L. Mencken. Rambunctious and often offensive, Crumb draws ...”

“... world and this gives him an appealing sheen of defiance. Leaving the community for stints of self-exploration seems to be reserved for men. The third-person narration remains tethered to Ruth, who looks aslant at the daily happenings on the Dorf: two sisters ladle mulled wine from a stockpot ‘in syncopation’; a class of children unearth an ...”

“... Civilisation (1986). In his monumental study of 18th-century identity, The Making of the Modern Self (2004), Dror Wahrman argues that ‘it is hard to overestimate – though easy to forget – the cultural significance of the masquerade.’ Devotees of Bridgerton might quibble with ‘easy to forget’: in the TV series the masquerade is a kind of ...”

“... white mothers, with their perfect jobs, perfect husbands and marriages, whose permanent glow of self-satisfaction is intended to make all the women who don’t conform to that image – because they are poorer or black or their lives are just more humanly complicated – feel like total failures.3 This has the added advantage of letting a government whose ...”

“... alike may express amazement and outrage at each fresh revelation that advantage is cumulative and self-perpetuating, yet sociologists and radical social theorists cannot fall back on saying ‘I told you so’ each time. Challenging – let alone reshaping – the individualist dogmas that underwrite the discourse of ‘opportunity’ is an uphill ...”

“... felt in the wider culture. But these caricatures obscure a real problem: a confusion between self and other, identity and difference, that you might charitably view as an unfortunate side-effect of being of and for and by women, all at once; or, less charitably, as narcissistic self-absorption. It’s true that ...”

“... of this iambic tetrameter to set down some defiant certainties for the future, with no guilt, no self-questioning:Irish poets learn your tradeSing whatever is well madeScorn the stuff now growing upAll out of shape from toe to top,Their unremembering hearts and headsBase-born products of base beds.Sing the peasantry, and thenHard-riding country gentlemen,The ...”

“... texte, or even prose. The nomenclature is revealing. Unlike the novel, the short story has no self-evident canon, is full of exceptions, and its official history seems to need the reassurance of those novelists – Stendhal, Dumas, Balzac, Hugo, Zola – who tried their hand at storytelling.This anthology is the latest Penguin national showcase (volumes ...”

“... showing up like iron filings underneath the skin, then these must be the over-stuffed jeans of self-delusion, the ones with a zip that coyly exposes itself to the world, its handle peeping between distended denim flaps. In my wildest dreams I was never wearing them. I had on chaps. I tucked my Yahoo T-shirt into my gunbelt and walked around like ...”

“... day, shades drawn, two cats, writing these songs of tortured love, up to the tips of her waders in self-immolation, often keeping at it well into the night? Celine Dion, Cher, Michael Bolton, Faith Hill, Toni Braxton – knocking you back one after another, all morning and afternoon, at least until the men arrive after work. I don’t know why. Perhaps it has ...”

“... a jug. I leave a perfect heel print on a molehill. Green lips lick. These touchy chemicals have no self-control. Warm it with your ice-cold commentary. I see the brushwork and I read it back into the far, well-swept corners of her floor, the perspective of her path, the Shrove-tide overcast she glances at outside. One way or another, if you are a realist, you ...”

“... none of this have surprised him? I can see him, sneering into his Terprin Hydrate, another fallen, self-lacerating ex-altar boy, third pew, centre aisle, at the Church of Eternal Damnation. A Valentine’s: Regarding the Impractibility of Our Love Evel Knievel, Robert Craig Knievel of Butte, now that one, that wild . . . The crack-up at Caesar’s Palace in ...”

“... Now it’s our mother’s link to life, her thread to safety from the labyrinth of the self. When it stops talking on the mantelshelf, that silence of significance will spread even to the newsless circles of our dead. The Fairy Flag I The fairy flag is in a frame like a picture white on white, like a fine tablecloth or shoulder-wrap too good to ...”