“... have noted that Le Diable, probablement reverses the plot, such as it is, of Un condamné. The self-condemned young man does not escape but goes to his death by assisted suicide. Fontaine, the hero of Un condamné, is a French Resistance fighter arrested by the Germans in Lyon in 1943. We see him try to escape in the opening sequences of the movie; and see ...”

“... situation and the only way out – learning how to walk with a prosthesis, to drive and be self-sufficient again – is to keep a tight hold on Ariadne’s thread and follow where it leads. That means working meticulously at the physio and teaching myself to do things like type this article with my gangrenous fingers. I look out from my bed at the ...”

“... while she says: ‘The rabbi is busy.’ Larry, worried enough not to be his usual polite self, says: ‘He doesn’t look busy.’ Several months seem to pass. The receptionist says: ‘He’s thinking.’ The second sage, Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner), nearly steals the movie, because of his air of infinite if never tested wisdom, and his grand ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... concerns a splendidly promising young Hungarian cellist, Tibor, who is taken up by a woman, a self-proclaimed cello virtuoso, who means to teach him to be truly great. This she does without touching a cello herself. She is given a name (Eloise McCormack) and a habitation (Portland, Oregon, though she spends a lot of time in the most expensive hotel in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at the request of state prosecutors to ascertain whether the two bullet holes in his skull were self-inflicted or whether at least one was the work of Pinochet’s troops. Both exhumations failed to prove murder. Last year Chile also exhumed Pablo Neruda, to determine whether his apparent death from cancer in 1973, shortly after he published an article ...”

“... knows what he believes and he is sure he is right. This is what gives him his surprising levels of self-confidence (as he told the Financial Times last month, ‘Britain needs a Labour government and Britain needs a Labour government led by me’). He appears to think that speeches are a good way to convey this sense of conviction – that oratory works to the ...”

“... in this matter. They leave the movie joke out. They are up to all kinds of things, but dizzying self-reference is not one of them. The short adaptation made by Tarkovsky and two companions in film school in 1956, also included in the Criterion set, does retain the joke, but the very literalism of this work’s loyalty to Hemingway’s text has an eerie ...”

“... Norrie’s Law – but can’t interpret them. So the gaps in knowledge are colonised by our own self-projections: Celts as untrousered children of Nature, or untamed frontiersmen, or merely as those marginal Brits who for some reason like not being English. But stumbling out of this exhibition, you begin to wonder who is peripheral to what. Maybe it’s the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... used to be one of its strengths. Certainly Hare suggested back in 1993 that the Tory absence of self-doubt was what gave them the edge in any tight contest. I’m not sure that’s true any ...”

“... a place on one of their ships, or perhaps even a desk job in London. Basil was more withdrawn and self-possessed. He seemed to have independent dealings on Mykonos. Radu, the barista, was our resident artist. He had hitchhiked to Thessaloniki after deserting from the Romanian army when Ceaușescu fell. He got a tattoo of a black star on his throat after he ...”