“... 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 ...”

“... men played then. Real good players.’ I’d watched young men at pool in Rock’s Coffee Shop, self-confidently rolling with their sea-ice cakewalk round the table: denims and bandanas, outdoor-booted, quietly competitive, but less to win than figure a trajectory, the likelihood of one uncertainty against another, the slice, clack and negotiated tangent to ...”

“... and criminal are connected – they are brothers, secret sharers, divided halves of the same self. In Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, the investigators find themselves taking on many of the outward roles of the men they investigate: they live in their rooms, perform their jobs or wear their clothes. By the end of both novels, the detectives have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of propaganda films, it was not politics, or even patriotism, that inspired Olga, so much as self-preservation. Never allowing her Russian name and origins to be a liability, she somehow managed to remain a star. It was only in the closing weeks of the war, as the Red Army neared the German capital, that she had to face up to her divided loyalties. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Anna Magnani we see in the film clip on TV. And Almodóvar’s direction is discreet and funny, self-conscious without going quite as far as irony. Before all the violence and melodrama starts, Raimunda is washing up the dishes in the kitchen. A sudden shot from directly overhead shows her handsome cleavage and a large kitchen knife. We’ve already seen ...”

“... The Horned Man, however, is concerned with the campus only up to a point: its world is not self-enclosed, and can hardly be so, set as the college is in a decaying suburbia connected by the Metrorail to a city governed by a similarly disciplinary regime, although not one motivated by political correctness. Miller more than once invokes Angelo in ...”

“... But given the nature of this lifelong project, there is astonishingly little anger, moralising or self-righteousness in his writing. It was not exactly a case of tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner: he had an unusual capacity to record, without forgiveness or nostalgia, the unfolding of a painful national story. And he understood that this story was his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lot, since the Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and 1980s (the setting for the movie) bred self-proclaimed geniuses in the way Sheffield used to produce knives and forks.Manchester – as opposed to ‘Madchester’, that later, Kangol-hatted, dungareed, spliff-wielding horror-show, c.1986, which gave the world such neanderthal hedonists as the Stone ...”

“... the Observer to find it impossible to believe that their faces are not portraits, quite possibly self-portraits. This may be a more comforting tale to tell than the one to which scholars of this material generally subscribe: that the use of a system of ‘module and mass production’ accounts for the diversity. The phrase was coined by the German art ...”