“... as that painting – so claims the novelist Dan Brown, incorrectly – is an ‘androgynous’ self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, Moss’s ‘gamine look’ has a similar ‘sexual ambivalence’. Susannah Frankel, a fashion editor at the Independent, has made the same comparison: ‘Kate Moss is a modern-day Mona Lisa. Although at times she might appear ...”

“... narrowed eyes? The fear that you’ll realise the truth about us? That we are, deep down, self-disgusted losers? Or maybe we’re afraid you won’t notice. It doesn’t matter how many books we’ve sold, or whether we’ve been on Letterman or Oprah. We’re nerds. Dorks. Putzes. Schlumps. And we don’t want to let you forget it. In his first two ...”

“... I nibble leafage’. Some readers sympathise with the narrator while others find her appallingly self-absorbed and demanding, but no one has criticised Rush for his ventriloquism. I suspect this is not because he managed it so well, but because by situating most of the novel in Africa, where he lived and worked for six years, he was shielded by the authority ...”

“... greatest theme. Some of Hogg’s poems in the Spy, as Scottish poems like to do, trumpet a rather self-satisfied nationalism. Scottish writers are too fond of gazing at the thistle. Over the last few centuries, canny Scottish writers have liked to hustle, often embarrassingly. Boswell was self-consciously, sycophantically ...”

“... the remarkable success that it did – and continues to do. It certainly trades on the archly self-proclaimed nostalgia of its title, and on the wry vista it offers onto a lost world, through the childhood recollections of an elderly woman (Raverat was well over sixty by the time the manuscript was finished). And it includes a handful of brilliantly told ...”

“... life, which is unsatisfying for both parties because Carmel is relentlessly practical and calls self-reflection having ‘too much imagination’. Felim is bad, but none of the novel’s male characters are much to write home about. Nell’s university friend Mal is flaky and given to disappearing acts; her housemate Stuart leaves his washing in the ...”

“... shunned solidarity with fellows such as Nussbaum, joined the NSDAP in an act of uncritical self-betrayal, quit painting (to become a brewery executive) and was content for his old work to be exhibited in several editions of the Great German Art Exhibition, the state’s corrective to the celebrated and better attended Degenerate Art Exhibition.But no ...”

“... areas are now well on the way to being broken up and redeveloped. The architecture of the ‘self-financing’ management institute is encroaching steadily, and even the stretches of parkland that remain seem to be infested with moles. The business schools have been covering the ground with Malcolm Bradbury, Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett. Their ...”

“... one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and the heroic line, are not self-evidently one. Making them converge requires the critic to find heroic lines embedded within prose works (he finds a lot of them, some less heroic than others) and even to make sonnets from heroic lines embedded in the novels of Mailer. Heroic conduct treads ...”

“... town like ’s-Hertogenbosch stormed by Turkish troops. ‘The demonic siege of the Christian self,’ Koerner comments, ‘thus expands to encompass the entire ecumene.’ It continues in the present, and not only in the perceived Muslim threat to Europe, as Koerner details in a bravura reading of Adoration of the Magi (c.1490-1500). In this ‘decisive ...”

“... of a child. Smoothed from the national laundry is a crease. The penguin. Its raised beak. Its self-important air. An advice bird. Rising trumpets lift up through shafts of attic sunlight. Sound-motes. The air is soothed. Chords on dusty keys. There she goes! Straight as a die! Tantara! (ii) A press of the old against the young, craning their necks to ...”

“... Something goes away and something comes back. But through you. Leaving no trail but self. As trails go not much of                      one. But patiently you travel it. Your self. You hardly disturb anything actually, isn’t it strange. For all ...”

“... in horror as a country they admired for its pragmatism and sangfroid fell into pseudo-Churchillian self-delusion.I gleaned two new facts on my way to see the Old Masters at the Gemäldegalerie. One was that ‘the imperative to open windows’ is now part of many Berlin rental agreements. The other was that opera venues, keen to get up and running, will only ...”

“... Despite all its limitations and ambiguities, the Declaration of Principles for Palestinian self-government in Gaza and Jericho marked a major breakthrough in the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In one stunning move, Arafat and Rabin have redrawn the geopolitical map of the region. The Arab-Israeli divide was one not merely between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states, but also between Jewish and Palestinian nationalism ...”

“... rather maddening. As revealed in his letters he comes across to me as vain, attitudinising and self-dramatising, self-obsessed yet – to the very end – with very little in the way of self-knowledge. I can see there must be something wrong with this reaction, and for the good reason ...”