“... or slipping him a few extra excuses for his behaviour. Sean Penn is the guitarist, a breezy, self-admiring fellow whose vanity would be a weakness if it were not his defence against all other, more difficult feelings. He can’t settle down, he tells his women. He’s an artist. He has to move on. Then he moves on once too often, and watches his lifetime ...”

“... he had a strong personality, and was determined to get his own way, is clear. That he was often self-righteous, and sometimes self-deceiving, is difficult to deny. There were many contradictions or at least paradoxes. Stafford Cripps was a man from a background of established wealth and, after he married Isobel, they had ...”

“... And, as you’d suspect, this ridiculous hunger for bogus knowledge comes not from his ‘inner self’, but from his girlfriend Dita (an Ashkenazi Jew): ‘He went/to a left-wing rally with his girlfriend Dita Inbar.’ Oz is at his very worst on the subject of the ‘left-wing rally’. He fails to observe even a rudimentary intellectual decency. He can ...”

“... are being addressed in a new edition. The book begins with a prologue describing the magnificently self-congratulatory dinner held to celebrate completion of the original OED in Goldsmiths’ Hall on 6 June 1928. This was Derby Day, which allows Winchester to describe the social scene and to opine: ‘A great horse race on a sunny afternoon tends always to ...”

“... bellyful’ – but knew his case was far from unique: Wedgwood, Boulton and Watt were all largely self-taught. So, unconcerned by the views of those who looked down both on the provincial and on the novel as a form capable of effecting or even imagining real social change, Bage continually engaged in his fiction in a critique of the world in which he ...”

“... artifice that can be entered only after things have broken down. They are, in short, as self-propelling and potentially dangerous as the sexual fantasies of The Fermata. The Fermata lost Baker a number of fans (‘Goodbye Nicholson Baker, goodbye for ever,’ Victoria Glendinning said). He has been scrambling ever since to recover his accreditation ...”

“... to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality. All we can safely predict is that, if exposed long enough to the tom-toms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with the savages.’ In The Manchurian Candidate it takes the diabolical Yen Lo ...”

“... double entendre of ‘regarding’ in her title is joined by a third, fainter association, that of self-regard, which alerts us to the possibility that societies, no less than individuals, may be flattered by their own lofty sense of purpose when confronted by human misery. ‘The national consensus on American history as a history of progress,’ Sontag ...”

“... the fragmenting of families and communities, and the traditional American spirit of frontier self-sufficiency. But why did so many people die during those days in Chicago? For one, there are many elderly people in the city who are afraid to answer the door, let alone seek outside help. There are neighbourhoods where social service case-workers try to ...”

“... as democratic levellers. When the girls arrive at Hever Castle, they find another artificial and self-contained environment. They are disturbed by the ghost-crowded aura of the castle (a childhood home of Anne Boleyn) and rush towards the wide-open spaces of the estate. The bad writing of this section may be a piece of cleverness I don’t quite get. Here ...”

“... he would be forced to look back on the abandonment of his family with nothing but regret and self-reproach.) Wallace’s title, The View from Here, is a phrase Williams used to capture the contingent and perspectival determinants of our values and commitments. Although Wallace believes that not all practical or value judgments are perspectival in this ...”

“... Lawson. His scholarly background is in Holocaust studies. Instituted, in part, to promote ‘self-reflection’, Holocaust studies are presented in Britain, at least popularly (all those Second World War programmes on the History Channel), as exclusively to do with Germany, and the reflection they reinforce is the old ...”

“... oil price above $50 a barrel for the first time in the country’s history. Violent activism and self-enrichment continued after 2007’s rigged election, but suddenly subsided in 2009, when the government launched a well-funded amnesty programme to pay off ‘the boys’ in the armed groups. Militant leaders such as Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari – the ...”

“... end of the play Arthur declares: ‘I am no author of my history.’ The play genially hands out self-conscious chuckles, sometimes even without nudging you in the ribs as it does so. Accompanying the play are two contesting sets of notes. One set is ascribed to an earnest Shakespearean scholar called Roland Verre, whose name implies that in him scholarly ...”

“... makes the journey via his own urethra, an experience that’s described as ‘odd’ and ‘self-referential’. Many things are possible at the HoH: reversible ‘crotchal transfers’, for instance, or sex, of a sort, with Rimsky-Korsakov. In exchange for a larger penis, a man called Dave has an arm lopped off. Another man, Dune, threatened with the ...”