“... for modernity through their stark receding repetitions. Alternately, there are his melancholy, self-referential pasts: the old street clowns whom no one still cares to watch, or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, forlorn spirit and squat flesh, adrift in a Parisian’s fantasy of desert Spain. ‘A Third-Class Carriage’ (c.1865) That this exhibition is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the United Nations, former director of Harvard’s Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and self-described ‘genocide chick’, who advocated war in Libya and Syria, and argued for new ways to arm-twist US allies into providing more troops for Obama’s escalated but unsuccessful war in Afghanistan. This last argument wasn’t successful in ...”

“... word on judicial tenure be in the hands of politicians? There is no prescribed procedure, and no self-evident format, for trying a judge at the bar of either House. The only judge ever to have been dismissed on parliamentary motion was an Admiralty judge, Sir Jonah Barrington, who in 1830 was found guilty of misappropriating litigants’ funds. The case ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reminder that one collector’s treasure is another’s trash, that a deadpan readymade may trump self-conscious ...”

“... dramatic and genuinely sacrificial: ‘The composition of his … artwork had imposed upon him a self-destructive lifestyle.’ Not compensation then (‘Life is short but art is long’) but up-front, unguaranteed payment: Art is long (maybe) only if you make your life ...”

“... the mood of supposed distaste is really part of the city’s offbeat attraction, its infectious, self-regarding faith that there is no place like it. In Antonioni’s view – or in our view of his view as it appears after fifty years – that London was not so much swinging as dangling and scampering, not sure what it wanted but desperately sure of wanting ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a tie. Ackland’s memoir, For Sylvia, which tells some of this past, is absorbing, and stunningly self-absorbed. It deals in blights, anaemias, religious guilts and bad period pains; it is strewn with expressions of love for Sylvia Townsend Warner, and it is strewn with expressions of anxiety which hover between the frank and the fanciful. The most persistent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... married another lady of entirely chaste demeanour, with whom and with which he lived in placid self-satisfaction ever afterwards, although they had rather a tiresome time during the German invasion of 1940 and had to retire (for good, as it turned out) to Rhodesia. And oh yes, I almost forgot: for some part of every featureless day Mercer withdrew to his ...”

“... whose indebtedness to other literary works has nothing to do with derivativeness – nor with a self-regarding pan-literariness. Rather, Banville reminds us of the ways in which, and of the extent to which, literature can legitimately be made out of the issue of its own mode and being – and can thereby address profound issues of human cognition and ...”

“... look so many times I’d forgotten what it was. The whole thing looked like an instrument of self-torture with a handle and a zip. I made my entrance and everyone wanted to know where I was off to looking like that. My brother did a comb mime with his knife, tongue hanging out, jacket pushed back like a Ted. My father made me go upstairs and start ...”