“... took these features as evidence of Hirshfield’s ignorance and limited technical abilities; a self-taught artist, the critics argued, he probably couldn’t paint either lion or face so decided to keep the ones he found. In Master of the Two Left Feet, Richard Meyer tries to show that these compositional strategies actually reveal Hirshfield’s knowledge ...”

“... whatever’ – but it’s obvious to everyone around him that his moist desperation and air of self-congratulation are to blame. Some of the more unjust rejections in Tulathimutte’s work are the product of sexual racism. The masturbauteur in Private Citizens, a programmer called Will, complains that he is ‘pigeonholed as another Asian castrato’, and ...”

“... of which may have given him ideas – then the difference comes from the degree of intellectual self-consistency. Amis writes with a kind of working self-knowledge that brings him closer to the earlier and classic masters. His larger ‘artistic’ capacities, that is to say, can only be defined paradoxically as a larger ...”

“... reconciled, like Belial and Mammon. In life, they were a family of sportsmen whose only sport was self-interest, who made up in neuroses what they lacked in achievement, who relied upon ferocity rather than feeling. Without the light which the falling Oscar distributed upon them, they would have remained in obscurity. Brian Roberts may well have stumbled upon ...”

“... it was the amusement of a child and a devil.’ Wilde’s laughter mocked Gide’s faith in self-affirmation, his belief in a sexual conversion experience. For Wilde, the notion of a fixed identity, a deeper nature, was a delusion, and the celebration of this ‘authentic’ self, even a defiant homosexual ...”

“... of him from photographs. He was not himself a Nietzschean personality – too reticent, too self-absorbed, unconcerned with the Classical past or with overcoming the present. And although Spilliaert saw Munch’s work in Paris in 1904, Munch’s attempts to find pictorial metaphors for human relationships and emotions, particularly sexual ones, seem not ...”

“... airmen were quickly rejected by the body. His work introduced the concept of a biological ‘self’. He found that the patient’s immune system not only recognised the ‘non-self’ tissue of the graft but saw it as a hostile intruder and tried to destroy it. This led to the development of drugs to suppress the ...”

“... the later part of the 20th century will have heard the word repeatedly in the context of a falsely self-deprecating joke. It suggests that those who live in so-called underdeveloped places know when things don’t work, it’s part of their life. A lot of things don’t work in the developed world either, but there no one seems to notice. It’s also possible ...”

“... inner space was barren and haunted. The marvellous thing is that the barrenness brought him not to self-denial or self-hatred but rather to a kind of tense curiosity about every Jewish phenomenon, especially the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish language, the Yiddish theatre, Hasidism, Zionism and even the idea of moving ...”

“... of relativism, for the same has been and will continue to be true of all historic proclamations of self-evident and universal truths. After all, the two most self-evident truths of life on this planet are that the earth is flat and that the sun goes round it. The truth that all men are created equal was far from ...”

“... he understands are used by street gangs in Los Angeles.] Also due in March is a memoir called Self Abuse by Jonathan Self. Whether or not he may have any famous relatives is hinted at in the John Murray catalogue, which tells us that Self’s father, ‘Professor ...”

“... of the Common Programme of the Left, in 1972, as the crucial moment at which a whole range of self-identified leftists, from older progressistes to anti-Soviet gauchistes, suddenly begin to wonder, at the prospect of an electoral victory finally bringing the Communist Party to power, whether that was really what they had in mind after all. I also take the ...”

“... a year, as hope of relaunching his invasion of Venezuela dwindled and with it his credibility and self-respect. Raleigh and Miranda: ‘obsessed men, well past their prime, each with his own vision of the New World, each at what should have been a moment of fulfilment, but really near the end of things, in the Gulf of Desolation’. Raleigh and Miranda are ...”

“... him, according to Callow, ‘much of what he knows aesthetically about sound’. That Welles was a self-conscious tyrant was crucial to his achievement. It may also explain his ambivalence towards acolytes and admirers, what Thomson calls his ‘dread of the thing most desired’. ‘I’m a king actor,’ Welles admitted in a late interview, ‘maybe a bad ...”

“... to rule themselves.’ By the end of the year, postcolonial states had enshrined the right to self-determination in UN Resolution 1514. Britain abstained. The following year, in the face of an emerging international consensus on racial equality and self-determination led by former Asian and African colonies, South ...”