“... choose and not to care is to conform by default – which is the most insidious choice of all, and self-defeating.The look of a giraffe or macaw is evidence of breeding success in the generations of ancestors through which the species wandered to achieve drabness or splendour. Although our fashions evolve year by year, rather than over millennia – and are an ...”

“... should be no barrier to loving and coupling. The Church of Me is just one example of Spencer’s self-absorption. It protected him from ‘the tame formalistic orthodoxy which was Roger Fry’s enduring legacy to British art’ (Hyman’s comment on Fry’s dismissal of Spencer). It also made him uninterested in the physical qualities of painted canvas. His ...”

“... gestures of the figures round the crucified Christ make all the religious art which followed seem self-conscious and knowing. No wonder our moment does not allow directness of that kind. At the Saatchi Gallery, Boris Mikhailov’s photographs of the Russian homeless are shocking, as people on our own streets are, and shocking in a more straightforward way ...”

“... Lady, who to make things all the more poignant (or aggravating) is now just a shadow of her former self. So too is the British Empire, which persists, against all the evidence, in reimagining itself ruling the waves and capable of decently governing even its local citizens. There might be some who find a touching irony in Meryl Streep’s mentally diminished ...”

“... had tormented the shy, lovesick painter in his youth sits enthroned in a flashy drawing-room, a self-satisfied, puffy-looking old trout, holding her horrid little dog in her arms.’ This sort of picture, he writes, is ‘“bad painting” before its time’. But the bad paintings are not bad enough for that. There is no sign that Vuillard’s tongue is in ...”

“... with the patient under a general anaesthetic. She lies, eyes shut, mouth half open, apparently self-absorbed. The same expression is worn by women in Japanese erotic prints, or in those which show them being attacked by succubi. The illustration is placed elegantly within a circle, the blood, of which the artist has not hesitated to make a pattern, flows ...”

“... abaya. It turned out she was only a couple of months older than Wayne. But she was much more self-conscious, self-possessed. Being a girl, I guess. Girls grow up quicker than boys. Well, Ingie, that was her name, the woman’s I mean, chatted away – although you couldn’t really call it chatting since her English is ...”

“... point with such extravagant gusto. But others felt a distaste for our press then, and do now. How self-righteous it can be, and how outrageous. Today Americans would add: how powerful. Our papers no longer have to retail fancies of the crimes committed by political leaders in childhood. We have a press that exposes real official wrongs: a press which helped ...”

“... be committed to housework. For people who can pay others to do that, voluntary work is a means of self-definition, a route to status, to MBE or DBE. One of several reasons why P.G. Wodehouse is rather a subversive writer is that much of his best work (he worked assiduously all his long life, and loved it) presents characters who don’t work and don’t mind ...”

“... This theory is a step towards the right answer, but taken alone it is absurd. Joyce was a self-important man, as he needed to be, and he had described Stephen in a book title as a portrait of himself when young: he would not trivialise the character without warning, in a continuation. Actually, the book confronts Stephen with a grim necessity: for a ...”

“... combined with the relative impotence of medicine, was responsible for the traditional rivalry of self-esteem between physicians and surgeons, as I suppose it may have been for the apostasy that made old Dr Thomas give up medicine for surgery. Therapeutic nihilism, says Lewis, was a ‘reaction to the kind of medicine taught and practised in the early part of ...”

“... causal links that shape this happy outcome. If he wants to argue that the members engage in self-deception, then he should say so – and also sketch an account of that notoriously elusive phenomenon. In Bourdieu’s universe there are only snobs, at least according to what I shall call his official view. Everybody is all the time looking over his ...”

“... religious and familial loyalties, weak internal communication, civil discord, or even conflicting self-definitions of membership, make it difficult if not impossible to establish a consistent and uncontroversial criterion for delineating their boundaries. But this need be no more of an impediment to the formulation of a theory of the evolution of societies ...”

“... but they could not bear to see it befouled by warmongers and racists. All of them could see the self-evident connection between the rise of the war party in Washington and the defeat of civil rights and the ‘Great Society’. Many of them came from families where military service was a proud axiom. All of them felt guilty and indebted for their luck. At ...”

“... Wagner transcriptions on the piano to drown his despair); Frau Tuzzi’s self-deluded love for the Prussian financier and polymath Paul Arnheim; the poet Feuermaul’s flatulentverse. But the ferocity of these attacks argues for the importance of what is being defended. The experience of soul is made central to Ulrich’s intellectual ...”