“... meaning, they have Nabokov’s charm. His tendency to act out versions of his loftiest, lordliest self – a ‘set of attitudes, prejudices, habits, remarks, performances which is highly visible, highly stylised, and which I find dull and narrow’, as Michael Wood put it – is not present. Instead we find him struggling with sleep, dreaming about ...”

“... what it would be like to swap identities. What if I hadn’t lost my bag but had found a self? What if my lost property belonged to someone else now, all those white T-shirts and black jeans and pullovers from Joe Bloggs? It seemed a writer’s problem to me, the first of many, and I enjoyed the scheme of unreason, the daft possibilities, as I ...”

“... of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang – except it’s a monument to capital rather than revolutionary self-reliance. Both towers are steep pyramids, stretched vertically until they reach insane heights above the river they stand beside, with a viewing platform at the top drawing tourists from all quarters to see the low-rise city from an impossible angle. In ...”

“... in Dubai where they had to bring in running water and electricity in order to have the show. If self-transport is your thing, Lagerfeld was your man. He raised the game. He asked for sets that were like worlds. The average fashion show is 12 minutes long and it involves buyers and journalists inspecting new clothes. But, with Lagerfeld’s shows for ...”

“... the world; the Jewish propensity to seek atonement has been replaced by pious arrogance and self-righteousness. Their position is not unlike that of the Crusaders when they realised that the Kingdom of Jerusalem they had built in the Holy Land was merely an island in a hostile Islamic world. Or that of the white settlers in Africa, whose enclaves have ...”

“... in 1905, and not, as Clyde says, 1897.) A cardinal point of Joycean myth was the provincial self-absorption of Revivalist Ireland, but the record of a journal like Dana suggests anything but general literary paralysis: as well as rejecting Joyce’s inchoate ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ in 1904, it outspokenly attacked the Church and the Revival, as ...”

“... Carrie, that he has much idea what the power might be for. All these men are immensely wary and self-conscious, determined not to sell out as fast or as publicly as some other generations. Coppola is trying to bypass the old Hollywood by taking as much control of the process as he can: he has set up a studio, Zoetrope, which he hopes will provide a complete ...”

“... not distinctly memorable, either for good qualities or bad. They are not posturing, or false, or self-indulgent, or vicious in language: but there is no particular reason why any of them should be read a second time. Why is it that his critical comments, especially the negative ones, stick so much more sharply in the memory? It is not that they are ...”

“... ambition nor the measure of his failure. As genre, this is a kind illustration of the importunate self-advertisement found in young poets. As something more than genre, it reminds us of the long-lived idea that a studious application to high art was always a reliable inspiration. This Mulready learned in the Royal Academy, which he joined early and served ...”

“... granted. Men are allowed, indeed conditioned, to deceive themselves to the end, and are loved as self-deceivers. Women have their resource – the romantic imagination. This faculty, which Jane Austen (and James Joyce, for that matter) considered so destructive, is the secret ‘richness’ of Barbara Pym’s heroines. ‘Richness’ is a favourite word. It ...”

“... this out of the libraries and into the home. Skip the campaign biographies: they are by definition self-serving, and by tradition footloose with mere fact (Reagan’s 1976 effusion had Britons committing suicide in the queues for National Health Service beds). The red meat, though in highly indigestible form, is here. The candidate’s name is nowhere ...”

“... and to the whole later story of psychosexual development? How decisive in this connection was his self-analysis, following the death of his father? Neither Ernest Jones nor Mr Clark had the means of answering this question: the available evidence is not sufficient. Mr Clark puts great emphasis on Freud’s determination, from the beginning of his professional ...”

“... combining the commonplace idea of the cannibalising of life by art with the idea of his physically self-consuming life as a writer. In 1906 he wrote to his brother Stanislaus: ‘Wurrak is more dissipating than dissipation.’ The two were, for him, intimately connected. The Rolling Stone assignment brought with it its own threat of physical dissipation for ...”

“... Rockefeller. Apart from politics, religion seems to get the best showing. A spiritual life of self-abnegnation is on the face of it a paradoxical means of acquiring fame, but the two French girls, Bernadette (‘shy, reticent, frail and poor’) and Thérèse of Lisieux (‘natural holiness – a conscious attempt to reach the ideals of ...”

“... of Mannerist ideals. But for a Venetian it was a logical development of traditional concerns, a self-confident response to an alien fashion. This interpretation implies that painters in Venice were able to think about what they were doing in a rather sophisticated way. It is generally assumed, however, that they were an unintellectual lot – inspired but ...”