“... range from the famous ones concerning the meaning of existence and the search for the true self to the less advertised but equally common one of how to survive the whips and scorns of time. Ernest Cotgrave, a Nottingham lad, begins his career à la Scheherazade, by taming the school bully – ‘Mek … summat … ’appen’ – with highly-coloured ...”

“... show you Hell!’ For Hell, as Shelley said, might be a city Much like London, dressed in cold self-pity Fanning-out in grids from dread of death, Its towers of hate above, its sewers beneath Where flows the dreck of self – the squares, the prisons All at the service of destructive visions. This in my chill mid-morning ...”

“... act ... she does not suffer ... she does nothing.’ Her writing, on the other hand, is painfully self-revealing. Sometimes funny, sometimes angry, she is unfailingly perceptive about the arts of acting and film-making. The description of Pabst’s direction of Pandora’s Box is one of the best things in the book: Alice Roberts came on the set looking chic ...”

“... and of the deflowering of Europe – the latter being a far less engrossing subject to this sexy, self-centred girl. The value of her diary lies in its artlessness. Here is femme moyenne sensuelle, unashamed, with nothing very noble or sensitive to commend her. The Diary of Virginia Woolf it is not. But she preserves for us the street vitality of a certain ...”

“... of better, against the money and security Laurie offers. Must we still marry Jo off in 2020? When self-partnering is a thing? When all she wants is to be independent and earn the praise of those she loves? Gerwig slips the noose ingeniously in a way I won’t spoil.I envy girls their literature. There’s no literature about getting old, staying in (or ...”

“... them. The social butterfly was also a very hard worker. Perhaps it was because he put so much into self-promotion and self-presentation that he had such a fine instinct for the way others could look. His identification with beautiful people was profound.Yet all these pictures together make a rather dull show. They are too ...”

“... If the protesters in City Hall Park are doing something significant by sitting still, what of the self-absorbed artist, churning out endless images? As elsewhere in her work, Eisenman figures the work of the artist as shameful – a burdensome and embarrassing narcissism. What is society supposed to do with the sheer accumulation of art, most of it bad? A ...”

“... day on a morning like this and set you in the way of that seascape blown raw, that hillside, that self-same note, the drone still in your ear, though somewhat dimmed, and no way to know what’s next, what sleight of hand those hags might bring to the game, or why it’s you at all, or whether the black and white, the yin and yang, that ever-turning ...”

“... to see why. She was an inventive and fearless early practitioner of set-up photography: the self-conscious ‘staging’ of images in order to produce a theatrical or conceptual effect. And as with many other set-up specialists, Cahun was her own favourite subject. Though it’s hard to say if she knew the work of either, two of her most notorious ...”

“... Wing and the Late Rembrandt show. Oddly arranged in that there are half a dozen of the great self-portraits at the start which I somehow feel should be the climax of the show, but better for me as by the time we do get round this quite substantial exhibition I’m exhausted. As always with Rembrandt feel almost arraigned by the ...”

“... lead their buttoned-up heroes to rapt confrontations with nature and the empty spaces inside the self. But each plays out in a historical reality that’s made immediately persuasive with no apparent effort. It somehow seems natural that Williams should know when and why it’s advisable to eat raw buffalo liver, how many cars there would be in a Missouri ...”

“... implications for contemporary poetry, given that so many once silent groups now clamour for self-representation. When an Irish woman attempts to rewrite the inherited poem, Boland argues, she has to square the circle of authoring a structure in which she tacitly appears as an object, an appropriated emblem. Many of the finest pieces in her Collected ...”

“... but even in Britain – which came to ‘Europe’ late, reluctantly, and with many signs of self-contempt – there was an enterprise of considering ‘British history’ as existing distinctly from the history of ‘England’ and of asking whether the extension of English sovereignty had created a ‘British’ nation with a history of its own.3 The ...”

“... find then that not only the Arts, but everything else as well, were only dreams, that one’s self was nothing at all. It is quite another matter, however, to tackle the 2180 close-packed pages of the stupendous new comprehensive edition. Altogether, it falls in word-length somewhere between War and Peace and A la recherche du temps perdu, and as with ...”

“... thing anyone was thinking about – apart from the author, naturally – was the fate of a book. Self-obsession of an ordinary sort, you might think, standard schlemiel come-uppance, but it gets royal treatment in the early part of the book, the part where a reader would normally be getting the measure of both author and narrator, which is easier when they ...”