“... 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 ...”

“... ethically fundamental. There is a shift from ‘Apparently altruistic behaviour is commonly self-seeking’ (which continues to privilege real altruism as a virtue) to ‘Altruism, pity etc are themselves contemptible, forms of weakness, a lowering of health’ (the notorious attack on pity in Antichrist is of this kind). Yet even in these shocking ...”

“... relatively cosy time he had been having in Vienna. If Leonore could be said to spring from that self which continually searches for the ideal in the face of fear, Fidelio, by contrast, represents Beethoven’s more settled, static response to tyranny and injustice, freedom and self-sacrifice.’ Leonore’s ...”

“... or calming. And it is oneself one is trying to tame, not just the other. The other in sex is the self we desire and fear.Dominance and submission … I am guessing that this is the aspect of Delacroix’s vision that most makes present-day viewers wince. But Delacroix is unequivocal. Maybe in the years following Sardanapalus he decided not to state the case ...”

“... been led by their subject. The first room is a pure piece of crowd-pleasing twaddle, filled with self-portraits from across Sickert’s career, some of them important works, that have been sundered from their natural bedfellows elsewhere. (More on this later.)Sickert would not have been Sickert without two early mentors, Whistler and Degas. He was a ...”

“... resonant images came more naturally to him. And it was cadence and image that energised him, not self-revelation. In a letter from 1960, before he had published anything, he wrote: ‘The common notion that you can make art out of your life, refinement of pleasure etc, is pure moonshine as far as I see it. There must be some morality. You might as well call ...”

“... of this new feminine ideal. Everyone was aiming at it, but Miller at 18 apparently had a cool self-assurance and a strong-willed, unforced recklessness, along with a sense of humour, that blended with her great natural beauty to make her instantly magnetic. With no specific ambition, training or calling, her success was certain – but as ...”

“... it is the most strenuous act of the poetic mind. Hopkins therefore commands himself – in a self-directed imperative, a form not uncommon in poetry – to ‘buckle’ those psychically assimilated qualities to his own ‘stirred’ heart, alchemising them into the subjective world of feeling, and thereby generating the imagination that renders them ...”