“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was Karl Rove’s reaction on meeting Bush for the first time in 1973. Wowed as he was by this self-made Texan, Rove, of all the president’s advisers, has been treated with more than occasional contempt. When Rove’s mobile phone rang during a meeting on Capitol Hill, Bush evicted him and locked the door so he couldn’t get back in. Bush would get Rove ...”

“... happy you’re real,’ a woman tells her when she is revealed to be Norma-off-the-radio. But her self-definition is built around a lack: ‘Rey’s absence clinging to her like some contagion’. Even more than Rey himself, she misses the person she was when she was with him. Unlike Alarcón’s stories, which are consistently gripping, Lost City Radio is ...”

“... Spain; but the couplet repeated at the end of each stanza locates the ultimate strangeness in the self. Each time they sing the couplet, the voices stop after the first four words. Then, slowly, alto, bass and one tenor (joined after two beats by the other singers) begin a drawn-out ‘yet’, whose new harmonies draw attention to the new theme: human ...”

“... his gay protagonists, but we get little sense of their emotional lives. They aren’t inclined to self-scrutiny. ‘We fell out of touch,’ Cam says, when asked about his estrangement from TJ. ‘The end.’ Jokes and gestures stand in for confessional outpourings, occasionally revealing an unacknowledged depth of feeling. But elsewhere the laconic dialogue ...”

“... reveals so well what, however artfully concealed, lay beneath the surface of his work: guilt, self-loathing, pettiness.Though Hecht’s poems often resembled cake decorations, he concealed an inner darkness that would occasionally refuse the frippery and leave the reader astonished. One of his most gorgeous poems, ‘Persistences’, begins:The leafless ...”

“... enthusiasm. The referendum inspired a return to active citizenship, encouraged by the kind of self-fashioning optimism about ‘new’ politics that it is fatal to refute. Of course, independence wouldn’t have been all it was cracked up to be. That wasn’t the point. Labour offered nothing remotely like the ideal of politics that people saw in the ...”

“... tax while deploring the press they relentlessly deploy. They fill their days topping up their self-pity and complaining that they haven’t yet got the knighthood they so clearly deserve. There’s a sense of hangover in Tom Bower’s book, as if the grand Thatcherite party finally met the morning, as if Brexit and designer gear and ‘no such thing as ...”

“... Gladiator. The third, silhouetted with his back to us and obscuring the candle flame, is a self-portrait: the artist shown blocking his own light source.Wright’s predecessor for candlelights in Britain was the 17th-century Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken, who had worked in London in the 1690s. Thanks to Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in ...”

“... established in London, Paris, Warsaw and the US. It’s the Selbstverständlichkeit – the quiet self-assurance – whereby references to specifically Jewish things barely occurred in assimilated German Jewish families. (I don’t recall seeing the word ‘kosher’ in the book.) It’s the appearance, in a chapter called ‘A New Generation’, of a radical ...”

“... to female narcissism, this is a Christian morality tale intended to warn against the sin of self-love. Karen is cast out of her community and her church; she has her feet hacked off, and the story ends with her repentance. What we remember, though, is not the final image of her blissful reunion with God but the red shoes, with the little feet still in ...”

“... it is true, but why it should stick so. Lionel Trilling, in an essay collected in The Opposing Self (1955), seems to repeat the claim but then makes a remarkable intellectual swerve. Tolstoy, Trilling says, is perhaps not the greatest of novelists but he is the ‘most central’: It is he who gives to the novel its norm and standard, the norm and ...”

“... in the shadows, to funnel taxpayers’ dollars to companies run by friends and acquaintances. Such self-dealing is especially likely in times of crisis, when it can be claimed that secrecy is necessary on the grounds of national security and competitive bidding rules are laxly enforced. But, once again, it makes little sense to blame such gross abuses of ...”