“... creature comforts are about the most they can hope for. Others again are queens. Few of them are self-deceivers. A doctor wrote stridently to the Observer, not long ago, to complain that the paper had been strident in warning of the danger to pregnancy of the drug Debendox. Because of this, he had had his ‘Sunday disturbed by a lengthy visit to an acutely ...”

“... discussing ‘false’ theories about it, one of which I admit to owning: that it is natural and self-generating, absent only if repressed; that it is artificially the result of accidental propagation of unnecessary ideas; that it is a misapplication of consciousness that should have been attached only to class; and that it is ‘the re-emergence of ...”

“... their roads to Damascus and, though the character of their conversions will vary, the degree of self-affirmation that results gives a new spirit and a new confidence to their practitioners. Where there is a respectable research tradition and a substantial corpus of associated literature, they no longer feel on the defensive. The emergence of younger ...”

“... a man who died, and in him died The large-eyed boy, then the teen peacock In the unremarked placid self-devouring That makes up being alive. But all at once Those natural overlaps got cut, then shuffled Tight in a block, their layers patted square. v It’s late. And it always will be late. Your small monument’s atop its hillock Set with pennants that ...”

“... lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen in Europe for decades. Such predictions are self-fulfilling, causing panic and thus bringing about the very eventualities they warn against. If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual ...”

“... silvery-tongued back-ups to whatever life-muddle he happened to be engaged with’. Yet Ford’s self-exculpatory fantasies animate the sequence in a wonderfully mad way. ‘I stand for monogamy and chastity,’ Christopher Tietjens says, setting himself against the times as well as his devil-wife, Sylvia. The books are suffused with a seriously meant – if ...”

“... of Western governments to rely on diaspora personalities to endorse their own wishful thinking and self-regarding readings of reality in the region, and as a source of personnel to be parachuted into power – or at least office – in each and every regime change effected by Western military muscle. In an advertisement broadcast recently in Pakistan, where ...”

“... to metaphors in capital letters (A PROBLEM IS A BODY OF WATER, THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE SELF, THEORIES ARE CLOTH, THE CHANGEABILITY OF A BELIEF IS THE RESILIENCE OF THE OBJECT) is a legacy of the work of George Lakoff, the originator and still the high priest of metaphor studies, who emerged from MIT in the 1960s as a student and antagonist of Noam ...”

“... early moment he is still hanging on to the old idea of the gentleman’s gentleman for the sake of self-deception. But this orderly dream is threatened almost immediately: Bogarde introduces his sister, Sarah Miles, as a possible housemaid, and it seems as if the two are planning some sort of robbery. They are, but not of worldly goods. Miles seduces ...”

“... nosy, curious, she was a collector of sleeping strangers. Also on display is her series of self-portraits taken inside aeroplane lavatories, done ‘in the Flemish style’. From a distance, she indeed looks like a figure in a Flemish painting wearing headdress and ruff; up close, the headdress reveals itself to be a white vest draped over a curved ...”

“... clear from the first room that Spencer is going to emerge as the star student. In a series of self-portraits done on Professor Tonks’s orders, Spencer’s – in red chalk on paper, with rugged cross-hatchings and a steady gaze – is the one that stands out. His Nativity (1912) hangs in the same room, painted when he was 21 for the Slade’s summer ...”

“... narratives. It’s hard to know whether this represents an increase in PR sophistication and self-awareness, or a decrease in the general level of discourse. It’s at the level of narrative that the UK’s economic figures for the last quarter of 2010 are likely to prove most consequential. According to the Office for National Statistics, the economy ...”

“... by Taika Waititi, the film’s director. It’s a wonderful idea to give Johannes this second self, the Hitler within, but we don’t get much out of it except our pleasure at Waititi’s antics, and when Johannes finally decides he no longer has space in his mind for the Führer, it isn’t because he has understood something about Nazism but because ...”

“... can’t bear to let go. There are several wonderful moments in the film that would count as sheer self-indulgence in any ordinary account of documentary film-making, moments of pure photography, so to speak, where the camera itself is amazed at what it can do, or perhaps at what there is for cameras to see. I am thinking in particular of a scene where a man ...”

“... and development of Hinduism, the RSS etc. This is already happening and will get much worse. Self-censorship, the result of fear, cowardice and declining profits, eats the soul. Modi’s triumph is, naturally, unpalatable to the metropolitan liberal elite and many on the left. But they need to ask themselves some tough questions. Let’s start with the ...”