“... Anna his Antigone. Miller’s struggle for the succession brought to the surface the complex and self-contradictory nature of psychoanalysis as a family affair, its members united by blood, or by marriage, or by transferential bond. Jacques-Alain Miller entered Lacan’s world at a fateful moment. In October 1963, Miller, then 19, had just completed his ...”

“... you ever kill a fish. I was once but now I am human. I have imagination. I want to love. I have self-interest. Things are not me. Do you have another question. I am haunted but by what? Human supremacy? The work of humiliation. The pungency of the pesticide. What else? The hammer that comes down on the head. Knocks the eyes out. I was very ...”

“... up on the sofa, feet criss-crossed with tan lines from her sandals (the day sleeper in an act of self-care). What was once plainly political has become familial, casual, intimate, or all of those together, and then back round to political again. When I look at Lange’s daughter-in-law sleeping, I remember that the US is the only OECD country where women ...”

“... have your last view of the nation, The river of a darkening capital And its diamond clusters of self-love. You could write now of good misdirected And innocence betrayed, but the deadline has come, Only the foghorns wail like creatures from Prehistory: Speak to us, who cannot see Where we are going or know what is ...”

“... they have more character than the young lady at the clavichord, or even the painter himself. In a self-portrait you notice the bright pages of the large, open folio on which his hand rests before you look at his face. The eye is unwilling to leave the still lifes. Given that, sometimes at least, they are there to be read emblematically, this is not exactly a ...”

“... Edgar Middleton, who called his autobiography I Might Have Been a Success. She also produced self-portraits in which the camera looks like a metallic face. In 1968, she pictured herself in perky miniature, beside a massive studio camera. She is shackled to the great beast by a cable, which could also be a ...”

“... subject addressed him. He bore the two first names that might be deemed appropriate to a divided self: Robert and Cal (for Caligula, and perhaps Caliban). According to Elizabeth Hardwick, ‘his fate was like a strange, almost mythical two-engined machine, one running to doom and the other to salvation.’ This is the language of the romantic tradition, and ...”

“... court social worker had told the prison escort service about William’s recent history of self-harm, so he was monitored during the journey from Glasgow to Polmont. When he arrived he was placed on Talk to Me (TTM), a scheme for prisoners deemed at risk of suicide. Those perceived to be at highest risk should be assigned a ‘Safer Cell’ and checked ...”

“... into periods of devastating flatness, alternating between grandiosity and lifeless reclusion. Such self-isolation need not mean total inactivity; both men became perhaps too used to the unnatural bubble of the modern recording studio. It was where they came alive, and could conjure unearthly realms. But when the work was done, the real world had to be faced ...”

“... wasn’t just American, but freakishly American, and like any good scout was both pathologically self-assured and incurably naive. David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-appropriate kind: coffee, sugar, cigarettes). Whatever the contradiction – mainstream ...”

“... sonnet 129, and says he takes ‘a single-minded expository view of the poem, as though it were a self-consistent sermon’. For Vendler, the verbal imagination’s true intent is ‘always to make a chain of interesting signifiers, with the ‘message’ tucked in as best the poet can’. And she says that because many readers prefer to think of the Sonnets ...”

“... There is something in the nature of the place, a residue of royalty and privilege and congenital self-satisfaction: the old dockside dowager has painted herself up for the punters, while revising her lurid past in amnesiac tourist brochures. Clap sores revamped as beauty spots. PR operatives delight in being both economical and spendthrift with the ...”

“... as their murderers could manage to lay their hands on. Thereafter Bassani has the tact and self-confidence to say little more of the fate that awaits his people, though we are later shown the various ways in which the malice and greed of some of the locals, and the fear felt by others, combine bit by bit to isolate the city’s Jews from their former ...”

“... or reveals itself as, convention. It measures the distance between the dreams of a younger self and the betrayals of adulthood, with its new dreams – some vibrant, some pallid. The black comedy of The Group comes from the characters’ lack of self-awareness, their bad judgment, their blind hypocrisy. Honest ...”