“... as telling in its way as the duchess’s ball, Gage admired the Rubens drawings and a Rembrandt self-portrait as he tiptoed round one of the casualties, a badly wounded ‘Hanoverian gent … fast asleep on a handsome couch’. The attempt to make this into any kind of Grand Tour faded as his days became increasingly overshadowed by the aftermath of the ...”

“... fine art teaching, he indulged his magpie sensibility, which seems thoroughly modern, unlike his self-discipline: ‘he will spend hours,’ Douglas Percy Bliss wrote, ‘covering a passage with tiny dots or flecks.’ One page of his scrapbook has a photograph of a crown, a little watercolour study (clouds?) and a scrollwork sketch alongside Cézanne’s ...”

“... America. The stereotype was an obvious target for Burroughs, who felt that those who assumed a self-righteous position on addiction only helped to ‘keep the junk virus in operation’. The differences between Burroughs’s and Clune’s views are telling: it’s less easy now to be confident that there is an answer to addiction. We don’t believe there ...”

“... between. His voice is precious, deluded, and becomes increasingly claustrophobic. The fastidious self-justifications involve the reader in uncomfortable trains of thought. His duplicity has a seductive logic: is cheating wrong if no one finds out? Isn’t having many selves more adventurous than having just one? Since we will all die, isn’t renunciation of ...”

“... turned on an argument in debate.’ Hawthorn prefers Book 8, in which the feints, smokescreens and self-deceptions of rhetoric have been cleared away and pure politics, the pursuit of goals through power, takes centre stage. It is here that he finds the work’s highest degree of ‘unillusion’, its most clear-eyed assessment of ‘the stuff of success and ...”

“... false narratives, and having two is more than twice as good as having only one.’ Are lies really self-cancelling, or is the candid answer that freedom to lie is part of the price we pay for freedom to speak? Anonymity compounds the conundrum. To expose or refute falsehood can be hard, but it can be far harder when you don’t know who the falsehood is coming ...”

“... the wink in the final sentence. As ever, Bennett’s protagonist seems wholly at sea and cheekily self-assured at the same time. So, what is it she wants from language? She professes herself averse to metaphor, to the labour involved in describing one thing in terms of another. But what is the narrator’s – or Bennett’s – alternative? It’s not ...”

“... of Crime and Punishment’, he suggests, is ‘that we care about the wellbeing of a calculating, self-absorbed hatchet-murderer.’ I’m not sure I care about Raskolnikov’s wellbeing, although that is certainly an imaginable response. I feel more like his guilty accomplice, in spite of my resistance to the idea. I’m attracted to Belknap’s claim that ...”

“... with urbanism and modernity’, and produced instead reactionary kitsch. If Renoir’s sin was his self-indulgence, it wasn’t a lapse: he pursued it as a programme. When, as a student, his teacher Charles Gleyre inquired whether ‘it’s to amuse yourself that you are dabbling in paint?’, Renoir was forthright in his response: ‘If it didn’t amuse ...”

“... great himself. And why not? Shouldn’t the person being toasted be allowed to express her ghostly self? At Elizabeth Jane Howard’s, the voice of the dearly departed couldn’t have been more distinctive. (By the way, is the departed a victim, as in a victim of death, or merely a passive recipient? Not to sound like an ad for Center Parcs, but does one ...”

“... committed to open debate. The GB News episode shows the flimsiness of this bit of conservative self-fashioning. Andrew Neil, the chairman of GB News, warned the companies that had paused their advertising: ‘This boycott business can play both ways … we can muster millions of supporters … Not a good idea to be on the wrong end of them.’ Boycotting ...”

“... Alison serene in a kimono, her hair in a ‘thick, dark, waist-length braid’.Patrick is prone to self-deception. On arrival in Los Angeles, he’s reminded that he hasn’t been hired to work on the script but as a production assistant. His pay is $15 an hour. (‘Isn’t that a job for a kid?’ his wife asks.) The film isn’t what he envisioned ...”

“... to anyone. In this branch, I try to ignore the noise from the other side of the wall: my happier self in his brand-new office ...”

“... In October, two scholars published a rebuttal, subtitled ‘God’s Shadow and Academia’s Self-Appointed Sultans’. A few days later, the original trio published a response to the rebuttal. By this time, the controversy had spawned its own hashtag (#Selimgate), numerous blog posts and an online poll asking how Mikhail ought to respond (a plurality ...”

“... doesn’t convey enough moral force. If altruism isn’t enough motivation, enlightened self-interest will do. More transmission of this virus anywhere in the world increases the chance of a more deadly, more transmissible, more likely-to-evade-vaccination variant emerging. Do we really want to sit like Professor Challenger in his sealed ...”