“... would take as a compliment, a sign that he was living up to his sense of his properly disreputable self. At the end of the film, as Belmondo lies dying on the street – the law has caught up with him, Seberg has given him away – he says: ‘C’est vraiment dégueulasse.’ He means disgusting in the sense of shitty, a raw deal, a mess, but what is he ...”

“... internet in general, promise to fill in the gaps between society’s three cardinal points: the self (individual, spectator, voter), the masses (population, audience, electorate) and power (party, spectacle, government). The promise is partly kept. Individuals can and do form flash commonwealths of mutual interest. For me, it was merely reassuring to ...”

“... In both cases the faces seem to look inward – painfully (in the case of Kollwitz) or in stolid self-defence (in the case of Evans). Kollwitz insists that you feel; Evans presents faces which don’t offer the connections with a painterly tradition of facial expression that more formal or overtly poetic photographs would. Although less obviously so than ...”

“... Powell’s claims for the act of writing it. They are pitched with characteristic fervour and self-confidence: There are a few other men who know from their own experience as much about the film business as I do, but, as far as I know, most of them can’t, or won’t, put it down. It needs to be written ... I didn’t intend to write another ...”

“... habit of mind.) ... In order to hide, it was carefully explained, one had to have a concept of self. Not only that, one had to have the concept of self given by the ability to speak academic language, or at least a standard human language – a concept of self that depends on the ...”

“... it could well have served as a collective title for the historiography of the post-war period. The self-confidence and sense of achievement which sustained this reformist vision disappeared during the Seventies. Rising crime rates suggested the ineffectiveness of police and prisons; critics of the treatment approach pointed to the invasive and discriminatory ...”

“... editors conclude, ‘the balance in the top 200 is an almost equal one between establishment and self-made money: 102 Old Rich play 98 New Rich.’ But it is well to remember that the Old Rich team, as one would expect, has a more stable composition, being recruited through heredity, historically consolidated, above all, in land. Just over a quarter of the ...”

“... irrelevant. It merely takes us back to the Nabokovian premise that fiction is not an exercise in self-disclosure, but in imagining yourself to be other than what you are. Moreover, is a Life necessary where the artist himself has left behind a masterpiece of autobiography? Anyone who has read Speak, Memory comes to Nabokov’s fiction with an absolutely ...”

“... private over the public as such critics do may be interpreted as a feminist gesture. But it’s a self-limiting challenge, for their language often chooses to exclude the wider community, operating in terms of jokes and quarrels shared within a closely-knit intellectual family. The repressive fathers are simply shut out, excluded by language. Feminist ...”

“... their strategies were demonstrably wrong and often absurd – and also, in the case of the GLC, self-serving. It went on to conclude that the Labour Party could never win an election under Mr Kinnock because he is ‘quite irretrievably’ just a ‘student union politician’. He is also ‘vacuous, verbose and comprehensively not up to it. The notion of ...”

“... the career, and to be unsanctimoniously unembarrassed about being serious – in short, he taught self-respect. With this he combined an approach that demanded that the text came first, and that the director and designer served it with clarity, lucidity, realism and grace. Lindsay Anderson cites the Periclean ideal as the model for Devine’s aesthetic: ‘We ...”

“... and sulky about the way things were as an adolescent raging against his pimples. The degree of self-absorption is remarkable. But while it is what made him such a good actor, it also accounts for some central vacuum which requires him to trash his talent, his world and anyone he comes into contact with. If you stare too long at the reflection of your own ...”

“... to overthrow. He may be tempted to reject the demand altogether. This reaction is naturally self-fuelling; the further one goes, the more irrelevant the demand may seem. However, the demand to get it right has great survival value. All the philosophers who have been found interesting for more than a very brief period of fashion have been driven by a ...”

“... his disastrous eight-year rule. Buchanan’s greed and guilt, his bloated and babyish egotism and self-pity, are surreally rendered: ill-at-ease in the land, insomniac, delusional, haunted by figures from history, by doubts which gnaw at him like mice (a nest of mice eventually colonise his intestines), he embodies the worst aspects of the national soul, the ...”

“... and terracotta. Barry Unsworth’s new novel is set in this DIY world inhabited by the suddenly self-made, the restless retired, the seekers of salvation in the soil – someone else’s soil, however, some corner of a foreign field. We’re in Umbria, in the sticks, not far from Perugia and not far from Lake Trasimene, where – hence the title ...”