“... Lebanon. But the madness is not just Israeli. Much of the Arab world is following the road to self-destruction, via a fundamentalist ideology that, perhaps unwittingly, reflects the worldview of Bernard Lewis’s disciples, the neo-orientalists. Lebanon is caught between Israel’s strategy and Syria’s. Israel, like the wolf in sheep’s clothing in ...”

“... bathers and dancers) or stereotyped (Cranach’s minxes and Boucher’s nymphs), or self-absorbed and unexpressive (Titian’s Venuses). Michelangelo’s subject is the human spirit manifested in the body. If faces were present in the studies, or if those in many of the finished works were not of such a uniform character, their variety and ...”

“... the common good. The ‘common good’ is a great soundbite, and Martines holds that only the self-interested – beneficiaries of corruption and tyranny – will stand against it. I wonder. There is Isaiah Berlin’s objection that goods are incompatible, and the Thatcherite objection that it is an excuse for getting somebody else to pay for what you ...”

“... He says yes; she flings her wine in his face. In keeping with the novel’s mood of dreamlike self-absorption, the event is replayed many times. Immediately beforehand, Stefan has been politely snubbed by a distinguished elder statesman named Harold Gedney. His hostess introduces him as ‘a wonderful dissident poet’ who has fled from East Germany some ...”

“... ranks of the middle classes, real and aspiring, expanded to include railway conductors and clerks, self-employed merchants and shopkeepers, factory foremen, detectives, butlers, book-keepers and bankers, it became something of a uniform, indicating an acceptance of modernity. Early 20th-century photographs of street scenes and Sunday picnics show a sea of ...”

“... in the case of Viagra. But isn’t it the case that you’re simply vain, the product of a ‘self-absorbed’ 1960s generation that doesn’t appreciate your father’s war-forged discipline and sacrifice? No. It’s that our culture has left me with little other territory on which to prove myself besides vanity. I mean, in the ornamental realm, manhood ...”

“... them. One of them may be said to originate with Hawthorne, the other with Melville, one lean and self-absorbed, the other heavy, expansive, determined to contain a world. On the whole the heavyweights have prevailed in recent years; one no longer hears much talk of, say, Glenway Westcott, a lean writer of whom Gertrude Stein remarked that ‘he has a certain ...”

“... try to implement the UN resolutions? No, because the Americans need us. Because, contrary to what self-righteous European columnists write, stability in the Middle East is not a necessity for the US. What are the lessons America can learn from Israel? First, that enormous damage was done when pictures from Sabra and Shatila were sent all over the world. So in ...”

“... idea this exhibition was, makes the connection to Poussin’s contrary (though not, as I hear it, self-vaunting) ‘Je n’ai rien négligé.’ But the rose on the unlovely pebble also reminds me of Poussin’s habit of bringing back bits of wood, stones, moss, lumps of earth from his rambles by the Tiber; and the story of him reaching down among the ruins ...”

“... Morrell when Woolf came to stay at Garsington Manor in June 1926. It’s possible that her look of self-assurance in these photos is connected to her pleasure in her outfit. She’s wearing a patterned dress and silk coat by the couturier Nicole Groult, Paul Poiret’s younger sister, commissioned for her by Dorothy Todd’s girlfriend Madge Garland, then ...”

“... and suspects that ‘beneath his courteous exterior, this guy was full of nothing but conceit and self-admiration.’ In At Swim-Two-Birds the characters murder their creator (who is, in turn, fictional – Flann O’Brien doesn’t entirely succumb to sado-masochism) and then write their own novel in which he is brought back to life, tried and then ...”

“... mostly within the justice system, between police stations, prisons and courtrooms. The system is self-contained and unaccountable: graduates of the Police Academy are automatically granted a law degree and can move fluidly from police station to prosecutor’s office to judge’s bench. It is inconsistent and unpredictable: judges hand down idiosyncratic ...”

“... of heavy-duty stuff about thermodynamic equilibria, neural attractors, morphodynamic activity, self-organising systems or, heaven help us, the quantum mechanical collapse of probability waves; nothing Deacon says explains why it should. What one longs for, but doesn’t get, are the circumstantial details that, in Pooh-Bah’s words, ‘give artistic ...”

“... who says to her daughter: ‘Daddy can’t be with us right now, he’s finding his inner self.’ Kaufman has plenty of satirical lines in this vein. An actress trying to cheer Cotard up with a bit of profound intellectual comfort says: ‘Knowing that you don’t know is the first essential step to knowing.’ Cotard, not intending any kind of ...”

“... and then of the Cyclops: ‘He does eat Odysseus’ men, but (anthropophagy apart) is this form of self-defence really so shocking?’ Well, yes, it is shocking: Homer makes it hard to get beyond the anthropophagy:    he reached for my companions caught up two together and slapped them,          like killing puppies, against the ...”