“... to see what all the fuss was about, whether it was something they could be part of sans affront to self-esteem. And those temple hyenas who had seen enough, nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze, were no place you could count on having taken a proverbial powder as rifle butts received another notch. I, meanwhile ... I was going to say I had squandered ...”

“... means real and genuine. It means pure and unadulterated. It means kernel and cream, and it means self. It’s the root word for yearning and for homesickness and for all the things people want.’ This Baum will go on to write stories about Oz, intending them to console the heart and strengthen the spirit, but they will be regarded as mawkish and ...”

“... back wall a line of ambulances is queuing up to deliver sick passengers to the hospital. We are self-isolated, safe in our fortress, as we wait on our order from the local bakery. This will be delivered too. An innocent contrast perhaps, though hardly benign. We are a month into coronavirus time. I began it by rereading Camus and then The Betrothed by ...”

“... infinite in its possibilities, yet always, like any narcissist, keen to get back to its immediate self. There is, though, as far as Everything Everywhere All at Once is concerned, one word in James’s remark that is quite wrong: ‘indifference’. The movie, like our world perhaps, is far too busy and far too nosy for ...”

“... San Francisco, introduced by Helen Vendler. Vendler had already done an edition of Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ for Arion, printed on roundel pages – wheels of paper 18” in diameter – with work by several artists, including Willem de Kooning and Jim Dine, as well as a selection of Wallace Stevens with a frontispiece by Jasper ...”

“... is about what is possible. That is the problem with realism’ – or surge into self-declarations: ‘I have no interest in telling stories; it is the process of storytelling that interests me,’ ‘I can only write about love when I am in love.’ He sometimes exhibits a desire to write his way around the desire to write: 19 October ...”

“... activities meant a quiz night in the pub or a quiz show on the television. Englishness means self-centredness and unsociability. They would do a crossword rather than engage in a conversation with someone. It is not the weather which has made me feel cold in the Englishman’s country after ten years, but the indifference shown by its citizens. I am ...”

“... meant to be impassioned, principled, brave and irresistibly sexy; but I found her spoilt, sulky, self-righteous and irritating. Justin only gets to know her properly and really fall in love after she’s dead. This is probably meant to be romantic but it’s actually quite creepy. And it’s depressing that there’s still any currency in the idea that a ...”

“... undoubtedly the greater sceptic. He sees 007 as part of a narcissistic repair job on Britain’s self-regard, which took such a pounding after 1945. Bond, as Winder understands (and loves) him, eased a generation of British readers into the realities of the postwar world – he calls this a long moment of ‘decompression’ – by offering a parallel ...”

“... at pictures within the tradition. He was in effect an insider. Rousseau’s case was different. Self-taught, he had been schooled in no tradition and had no authority to rebel against. As he had no contribution to make to its dialectic it is not surprising to find him on a siding in the diagrams that map the history of Modernism. He seems to have seen no ...”

“... with his drawings than with his paintings and I can affirm that in this he was not blinded by self-esteem to any of his defects. He found more pleasure in drawing than in painting. I have often seen him sulking because he could not render in paint the spirit and truth he could render with his pencil.’ The Comte de Caylus records in his Vie d’Antoine ...”

“... which had caused me to shift uncomfortably in my chair while David discussed the divided self, I began to look forward to my bibliotherapy session. A few days later I received a questionnaire by email, asking about my reading habits and life situation. By the time I’d filled it out there were no slots for several weeks, and after the consultation ...”

“... it ‘without irony’. As the exhibition demonstrates, it was impossible to invoke it without self-consciousness, but that is not the same thing. The cult of the cult of ruins continued to serve British artists well, especially the neo-Romantics of the 1930s and 1940s. Paul Nash’s abstracted megaliths, geometric forms set in the Wiltshire landscape, are ...”

“... with Beckham. They didn’t ask him any questions and they didn’t look at the trunks. They self-papped and drank a cocktail and then went home. That’s the job. ‘I think I might have drunk too much coffee,’ the man from Chinese Vogue said, still scanning the horizon for subeditors. I looked at the press release. ‘Anti War, Anti Social, Anti ...”

“... coffee. They do the rounds. Gabrielle leaves Lestat to go into the woods for a spot of extreme self-rendition, and experi-   ences déjà vu. She’s drawing blood, sucking up bodily     fluids wherever they may be. Lestat goes underground   in New Zealand, where once again he proceeds to push his portfolio. Marius subsequently subdues Lestat (Tom ...”