“... 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 ...”

“... is created; in The Old Crowd (1978), the film crew repeatedly appears in the frame; and If ...’s self-consciousness of its status as a film is put to intelligent (rather than merely clever) use. There is no attempt at naturalism, and the narrative slips between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ so seamlessly that it is impossible to distinguish between ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unofficial motto, according to a story called ‘Pair a Spurs’, is ‘take care a your own damn self,’ but this extreme individualism is tempered by a desperate need for human contact, a need that produces tenderness and brutality in equal measure: Wyos are touchers, hot-blooded and quick, and physically yearning. Maybe it’s because they spend so much ...”

“... by far the subtler understanding of human personality, that phenomenon that crystallises where the self and not-self meet, as they always must in ...”

“... British politics, is in reality ‘another chapter of decline and fall, accompanied by ever wilder self-deceptions which are really compensations for a certain inescapable and shameful weakness of state’. Donald Dewar finds Nairn’s antithetical habit of mind infuriating (as in ‘Youthism is not a bad term for the resultant terminal condition: a strategy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... echoes the sound of Pindar’s keladêsomen in Olympian 2.2. We move swiftly to Ode 4.2, that self-subverting recusatio on which Pindar’s poetic reception has been based: Pindarum quisquis studet aemulari, Iulle, ceratis ope Daedalea nititur pennis, vitreo daturus nomina ponto. [4.2.1-4] Whoever strives to contend [aemulari] with ...”

“... be faithful to the way the world was: the universe itself, he believed, was a set of endless, self-enclosed cycles, which his own art mirrored in its very narcissism. And this, perhaps, is where the trouble with his daughter, Lucia, began. For if Joyce’s art was concerned with nothing but itself, neither in some respects was he. Joyce was an author in ...”

“... urban life: for black and Asian writers, London is a place not of exile or alienation, but of ‘self-expansion’. Sandhu’s story gets going in the 18th century. There were blacks in London before then, but he wants to ‘show how they have depicted the city, rather than how they have been depicted’. So we start with Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography ...”

“... wrote in a tongue which was only ambiguously their own meant that they used it with the sort of self-consciousness which lends itself to Modernism. Because they were less hidebound than the English by the cultural pieties which the language sedimented, they were freer to take liberties with it. Colonial writers usually have more than one tradition to write ...”

“... what advances his plots and broadens our sense of his characters. In an era where a species of self-congratulatory prose is often mistaken for writerly talent, Lennon’s unselfconscious style does not assault the reader with reminders of its hipness. It is perhaps for these reasons that Lennon is relatively unheard of in America, despite having written ...”

“... life isn’t a parable. Musa is p0ssessed by a destructive desire to consume the world, Jesus by a self-destructive desire to repudiate it. But between these two extremes, in the wide wilderness between the saint and the devil, the other five characters need to negotiate an acceptable, or at least tolerable, way to live and coexist. In an earlier novel, his ...”

“... had it, a ‘cowardly’ act against ‘the free world’ but ‘an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions’. She notes the announcement that grieving centres were in operation and abhors the complicity of government and press to evade any analysis of ‘the colossal ...”

“... like, after spiders and football, is sharing. I was mortified, at having been suckered into a self-help group, after the considerable trouble I have taken in my life to avoid them. Sharing does the same visceral thing to me that happens when your mother pushes you forward at a party to sing a song. Nor did I need to be told that spiders didn’t want to ...”