“... combination of gentleman and player, a Coghill who inhabits an academy innocent of competition, self-serving and self-display. It may seem a Utopian fancy, but I think Wain locates it in a magical, rather Arnoldian Oxford that somehow existed alongside the real one, in the good old days. The old days, indeed, preoccupy ...”

“... the ways in which a particular thought form (a ‘consciousness’, as Hegel put it), or again a self-defeating project, can be necessarily involved in or presupposed by a social relationship or other historically-given development. Hegel had one big dark answer to that question; Marxists have lots of active answers, but they tend to scurry off when ...”

“... by his inability to find a real style to go with his success) is perhaps his most complicatedly self-lacerating: there is a clear suggestion that the man’s downfall has more to do with Scotland than with him. But then, on the other hand, who’d want to be an English pouf? There is no figure in Williams’s books who is both big-time and ...”

“... range and variety of reference are exceptional. She also writes, some of the time, with a fervid, self-indulgent miscellaneousness, in a kind of spray of allusions. There are too many one- and two-sentence paragraphs in this book: too many asides appropriate to a lecture, but making for jerky reading on the page. It must be said, indeed, that disjointedness ...”

“... of the poem’s creation become so much its theme that there is soon a disastrous lapse into self-consciousness, coy internal reference, sly tomfoolery and baragouin. This may be explicable in a number of ways, apart from by the sheer artificiality of the gimmick. The four poets were, we may assume, deeply versed in the two traditions which they were ...”

“... and Nesaule part-time and illegally, because she was underage. Worse than poverty was the self-doubt that came from having been thought ‘not even worth feeding’ as a child. It was as humiliating as a number tattooed on the wrist. Nesaule never believed that anyone at her American school could want to be friends with her. Once, when she was ill ...”

“... Maes’s paintings are hypersensitive to their status as looked-at things, and in their self-consciousness they make looking and watching subjects in themselves. Watchers are everywhere in the genre pictures, observing protagonists going about their tasks or locking eyes with the viewer in ways that can be discomfiting. In Young Woman Sewing ...”

“... other hand, the chief characteristic of China as a power in world affairs is its most un-Mongol self-absorption, which exceeds the inherent self-absorption of all very large polities, and of which the most consequential recent example was the post-2009 revival of a territorial claim over the barren rocks known to their ...”

“... The Bon Marché Department Store (1898) is a triumph of the exhibition. In a characteristically self-critical gesture, Vallotton implicates himself: a placard in the central panel advertising ‘Jewellery and Objets d’Art’ addresses the viewer, the consumer of his pictures, inviting us to see ourselves as part of the crowd and his paintings as luxury ...”

“... city we were still in awe of from above. Oxford can be an uneasy place for teenagers not reared on self-belief and champagne, and it was emboldening to walk it from above; the closest you could get to conquering the city. But it was more than that; I have always loved to be up high, and I have always loved the electricity it puts in the blood.Night ...”

“... case of today’s ‘socialism’ is China, where the Communist Party is engaged in a campaign of self-legitimisation which promotes three theses: 1) Communist Party rule alone can guarantee successful capitalism; 2) the rule of the atheist Communist Party alone can guarantee authentic religious freedom; and 3) continuing Communist Party rule alone can ...”

“... no choice: if they want to pursue certain types of case they now have to represent themselves. The self-represented take up far more court time. If one side has lawyers and the other doesn’t, the judge may intervene to even things up, but has to be careful not to show undue favour, which would give the other side a justified ground of appeal – and more ...”

“... features strongly reminiscent of those favoured by his teacher Perugino. But a famous supposed self-portrait, the first exhibit in this show, already shows surprising assurance. A study for the head of an apostle (possible St Thomas) in the ‘Transfiguration’ (c.1519) Raphael’s style and his approach to drawing was transformed by his period in ...”

“... American Booksellers Association jamboree was in nearby Miami’s South Beach that year). Will Self and his American publisher, Morgan Entrekin, arrived as I was leaving. The vast expanse of water and the huge hotel behind it made Self momentarily speechless. ‘Belly of an architect,’ he said, using the title of the ...”

“... repeatedly shown in elegant, hazy close-up, looks demure and modest, about as far from her usual self as she could be. It’s not that she usually looks guilty or complicated. She just looks as if she doesn’t know how not to have fun. Earlier, when she tells two of her friends that she has been offered a job by a trapeze artist, she runs lightly across the ...”