“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In the US, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 insisted that addiction was not a disease but a ‘self-inflicted moral infirmity’, which meant that American doctors who prescribed to addicts were liable for criminal prosecution. In Britain, the resolutely non-penal Rolleston system treated it as a disease requiring medical care. Neither country succeeded in ...”

“... with other characters), she gives her convincing motives and sets her up as a counterpart to the self-made men the Victorians so admired. ‘My ultimate fate in life,’ Lady Audley explains, ‘depended upon my marriage, and I concluded that if I was indeed prettier than my schoolfellows, I ought to marry better.’ She is not a heartless ...”

“... Thirty, Argo recounts an old secret mission in Iran. Is there a worry here? An act of national self-reassurance? An uneasy celebration of questionable moments? An easy celebration? Whatever the answers to these questions, they have nothing to do with Quentin Tarantino’s Django. This is a violent and lurid movie lover’s movie, alternating fluently ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... if, their evidence is ‘decisive’ or ‘potentially decisive’. The logic of this is arguably self-defeating. If a piece of evidence is not capable of contributing to the decision (and therefore of being potentially decisive), it ought not to be admitted at all. In any event, where the trial is by jury and the verdict consists of one word, it is often ...”

“... the protagonist of We Need to Talk about Kevin, Pandora is meant to be seen as a highly competent self-made businesswoman. In We Need to Talk about Kevin the narrator is profiled in Fortune magazine; here it’s a cover story for New York Magazine. Yet Pandora has no trouble taking leave from her doll company. Brother and sister rent an apartment together and ...”

“... her, and then the sexting began. It consisted of some banal obscenities and another batch of lewd self-portraits. Amid fairly tame scenarios of hotels and ‘fuckme shoes’ (Weiner seems not to have been able to lose himself completely: she calls him perfect and he says, ‘I’m deeply flawed’), he told her he was ‘an argumentative, perpetually ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a fountain on her college campus in a bikini, until a security guard asks her to leave. ‘I’m self-absorbed,’ Dunham has said, ‘but I’m not ...”

“... to imagine how baffled she would have been by that. But without losing sight of the absurdity, self-aggrandisement and malice in Whitehouse’s interventions, Thompson achieves a degree of intelligent sympathy with her. He resists the recent argument that she was a proto-feminist, but points out that some of her complaints specifically targeted the ...”