“... from Rebecca West, who trained for the stage – according to her son she remained ‘an incurable self-dramatiser’ – and who took her pen-name from Rosmersholm. But the inarticulacy and dimness are all Sunflower’s own. On the first page of the novel she is being dumb about machinery; on the last page she is seen worrying about her party dress and the ...”

“... narrow individuality and their sense of history. The burgh, the town which is – or was – self-governing as a tiny urban unit and at the same time closely linked to the farming and crofting world of its hinterland, is in many ways the real locus of Scottish history, and also of Scottish imagining and writing. Most fiction which is not patrician in ...”

“... more often associated with military, forensic, archaeological and medical applications. A self-styled ‘art-diagnostician’, and a non-fictional character in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, he is an awkward maverick among the cabals of the Italian art establishment. The composition of The Battle of Anghiari is minutely documented, but one piece of ...”

“... are doubled and the questions revolve around large and impenetrable subjects: the mystery of the self (‘Why am I troubled by this encounter with HB? Why am I also vaguely excited by it?’); the opacity of others (‘When had Hettie discovered she was pregnant? … But how could she be pregnant? … Had she been lying?’); and the uncertainty of most ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a censor sitting in an office, blue pencil in hand and red tea by his side: Chinese censorship is self-censorship, and although what to avoid is generally known, the discussions about limits take place between writer and publisher, not writer and state, and can be more flexible than we imagine. Murong also told us about the latest Chinese meme: an old clip ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”