“... were putting on plays about asylum. But German perspectives on the crisis were sober and often self-congratulatory. They rarely spoke to the negotiations and absurdities of leaving one’s country. This carnival of well-meaning had a fetishistic quality that wasn’t lost on Syrians. In a series of interviews with Arab writers in Germany, published in ...”

“... adjuncts to sacred art. If the assertive new somebodies of the 15th century wanted a licence for self-promotion, they could turn to Jesus balancing the things that are Caesar’s against the things that are God’s, legitimising both. Why not supplement the carved and painted saints in church with secular portraits that referred back to imperial imagines? A ...”

“... users.’ So now I was the troll? Me, with my burner, my bugging device, my fake account and my self-righteous mission? It was an outrage.The advice from my publishers was just to move on. It was not worth the effort required to get these kinds of account taken down. But I was already in too deep. I started up another, different, fake Instagram account ...”

“... is not unaware of the potential drawbacks of this approach. At various points she flirts with self-parody. LeVon, for instance, with her piles of research boxes (and the Woolybucket Compendium that she’ll ‘never’ get done), is clearly a kind of author-figure, and on various occasions Bob’s impatience at being presented with yet another nugget of ...”

“... power to control completely or to predict reliably, great works of art can break the circle of self-love which is often exceptionally tough in people of this type. The urge to possess begins to get out of hand, and the collector or owner is himself possessed. The paintings of racehorses by Stubbs, informed by an almost clinical aesthetic that reflects ...”

“... to show her how to do the scenes deadpan – that is, he copied her mannerisms, but dropped the self-awareness. Hepburn saw the point immediately, and said to Hawks: ‘Howard, hire that guy and keep him around here for several weeks because I need him.’ Her dizziness, in other words, had to look like real dizziness if it was to turn into something ...”

“... modern ambulance chaser who patrols the suburban ‘edgelands’ of the M4 corridor and the M25 in self-conscious imitation of the master. He tunes in to the police frequencies, and sells his pictures of pile-ups and corpses to the local papers. He, too, often arrives on site before the cops do, and he keeps his camera buttoned inside his mac when suspecting ...”

“... the theory of the novel, a deconstruction of narrativity – was inaccessible: it was ‘the most self-reflexive novel that it’s possible to write’, a book written ‘tongue-in-cheek’, she admits, ‘for a few narratologist friends’. But deconstruction rejoices to demonstrate that an author has really done the opposite of what she meant to do, and ...”

“... years; a girl in whom her mother takes a sporadic, detached interest; a peculiarly intelligent, self-possessed and furba (‘cunning’) child: these are leitmotifs of Bedford’s novels. Among the many middles of her memoir, the dead centre would seem to be the real end of her mother’s story, left unconcluded in Jigsaw. It was near Sanary in the South of ...”

“... knife) ten years before he decided to attack his wife: he was acquitted, on grounds of legitimate self-defence. Perhaps this happy outcome encouraged him in the belief that his luck would hold. If so, he was mistaken; we gave him 12 ...”

“... And there’s a threat contained within the thing itself – a nasty suspicion that it could self-destruct. These fears arise from Cragg’s ways of relating the elements of a work so that he seems to be keeping the lid on a potential explosion. And the threats to the spectator and the work alike are heightened in the glass sculptures because of a ...”

“... list of phrases taken from the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook, for example) and the use of self-help clichés to explain her characters’ motivations are distracting, as are her poorly constructed sentences and tendency to change tense several times within a paragraph or even within a sentence. Sometimes her style seems conscientiously to mimic the ...”

“... lively. The prose style of the Andrew Motion who claims to have discovered Tabor’s papers is a self-fiction of uncertain status. Are the clichés (‘writing biography’ is ‘a balancing act’, which ‘like all balancing acts, can’t be sustained for ever’) and tautologies (‘detective-style sleuthings’) deliberate? The flamboyant Wainewright ...”

“... These topics weren’t chosen at random: Ricks makes the interesting claim that ‘allusion can be self-delightingly about allusion.’ Allusions occur in passages that concern generation and sonship, or haunting and echoing, or secrecy and dalliance, because allusion itself can be described in these terms, as filial inheritance, or spectral reproduction, or ...”

“... 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 ...”