“... skin-crawlingly around: the past, it declared, was harder to escape than we thought. Next was the self-consciously musical Jazz (1992), then the extravagant, overwrought Paradise (1998), which I hoped was a glitch. Love includes something of all Morrison’s big themes: the position of black people in US society; the damage men do to women; the sustaining ...”

“... of Goodbye to Berlin with which he introduces himself means he’ll end up depicting his earlier self as a frivolous Weimar cosmopolite. It doesn’t quite work out that way. What’s more, the high-concept fun that The Golden House has with all these conceits isn’t, in practice, much fun, though not from a lack of incident. Petya and Apu quarrel over the ...”

“... palette and weak, overwrought compositions. In Promenade, Chagall depicts himself grinning self-consciously and made-up. He was by most accounts very vain; who else would make a painting such as The Poet Reclining (at Tate Modern, though not in Bilbao) on their honeymoon – an admiring self-portrait with no Bella in ...”

“... But strength and size are less significant than intent. Everyone can learn self-defence; and perhaps everyone should. But if someone is determined to rob you or grab you on the street, there may not be much that you, the average person going to the shops or walking home from a friend’s, drunk or distracted or tired from your week, can ...”

“... Germany had washed itself clean without: look, no fascism here. (This rather facile and painless self-absolving is one reason behind the rise of the AfD in eastern parts of Germany now.) Both of Elisabeth’s engineer brothers are tempted, but differently. The older one, Konrad, is ‘elbow-man brother’, with his ‘hasty, busy handwriting’, a ...”

“... hunt for those you get on with. On what level, though, do I meet their host? In a sense, he’s self-effacing: he speaks second person, forever exclaiming you! Other humans are what he cares for, and nothing could matter more. A pompous nouveau riche; a ragged fisher-boy; that African lad and a jester in blackface; a crazy old lady in the local and a posh ...”

“... going.Here’s my position:failing to gratify you would be folly on my part.This [gestures to self]or anything else you need – my wealth, my friends –it’s yours. I have one goal: for meto be the best Alkibiades I can be.You could help. Better than anyone else.I’d be ashamed not to give a man like youwhatever he wants.’At this Sokrates, in his ...”

“... We in the late 20th century make a fetish of leisure and pleasure: yet for most of us status, self-regard, identity and personal relationships are inextricably bound up with access to paid employment. The youthful rentiers of the Drones Club have not died out, but somnolent afternoons in billiard rooms have given way to frenetic action in the City; the ...”

“... know what the internet was. She had never sent or received an email. Her phone, devious and self-involved, was an instrument of torture to her: making promises it couldn’t keep; showing caring messages covered in love hearts that instantly disappeared, never to be found again; lighting up, at all times of day and night, with graphics and noises only ...”

“... women regain their strength as individuals’. Its services were run for women by women: self-defence classes, court chaperoning and support groups.Callers of any gender can use the RCEW helpline, but the workers are all women and many of the original feminist principles guide its practice. Accepting a caller’s account of their abuse stands as a ...”

“... amount of just hanging there.’ The piece ends with a comment on a regrettable ‘vast area of self-experience’, namely the fact that the sky is now so often a war zone: ‘That’s who we are.’ Just before this conclusion, however, the sky offers a reading of ‘a wonderful and forgiving aspect of Hindu thought’ that helps us to see why the idea of ...”

“... A Journey, published in 2010, was long, discursive, eccentric, a bit mystical, but also matey, self-confident, sometimes blunt, occasionally cheesy. It read like he’d written every word of it. The style of his new book, On Leadership (Hutchinson Heinemann, £25), has changed somewhat, as befits someone who now spends his time offering executive advice to ...”

“... wearers do – a glimpse, perhaps, of the Strachey that Carrington saw. She was also a frequent self-portraitist. The most striking of the examples at Pallant House is a watercolour from 1913 in which she stands side-on, one arm braced against a door frame as she strides forwards in baggy blue trousers, red-heeled shoes and a striped shirt. Her corps cap is ...”

“... exasperating in itself. Dunthorne realises it isn’t a work of record but a chunk of tendentious self-representation. The dead are no less cunning than the living. ‘If the narrator of the memoir was the ideal part of himself,’ Dunthorne asks, ‘then where had Siegfried hidden the rest?’Unforthcoming about the important stuff, Siegfried is elsewhere ...”

“... reviews and lectures that he did write fill a sizeable volume). Despairing confessions of failure, self-exhortations to patience, the jubilant acknowledgment of gifts of poems – all set down in the poet’s exquisite round hand (the hand he adopted at the same time as he Germanised his name from René to Rainer, in 1897): these form the substance of poems ...”