“... death of God: ‘there is,’ Scruton mystically claims, ‘a making whole, a rejoining of the self to its rightful congregation that come through art and literature.’ He believes that, like hunting, reading Jane Austen is a binding social ritual. TV adaptations don’t count. ‘The property of an educated élite’, high art was barely held onto by the ...”

“... the academy is hardly ever more than a backdrop for her, Moore nonetheless captures the weird, self-involved aimlessness of academic life, the curious way in which, like a psychoanalysis, it becomes both the method and the object of observation. In the story ‘Community Life’, a university librarian called Olena describes how she dropped out of graduate ...”

“... probably a happy marriage, it was undoubtedly an advantageous one. It set a pattern of enlightened self-interest that recurred throughout Hogarth’s life. In almost all his activities – his campaign for a copyright law to protect engravers, his generosity to the Foundling Hospital, the offer to St Bartholomew’s to paint the great murals there gratis ...”

“... a great portrait-painter by a not-bad apprentice artist. The book is not so much a portrait of a self as of a not-self, a character quite flat, and thin, and white, not even as rounded and remarkable as Powell’s amiable self-burlesque in his Journals, in which he ...”

“... sense, which implies a distinct occupational category, and the subjective sense, which is merely self-ascribed or idiosyncratic. He finds it more useful to work with what he calls the ‘cultural sense’, which recognises that the intellectual performs a role before a certain sector of the public, using media that reach audiences different from and larger ...”

“... World phalansteries were breaking up. Hubert, a French teacher, went on to sell his patent for a self-fastening button to the US government for $120,000 and became an architect. He finished the Chelsea in 1885 and in Tippins’s robust, utopian take, it always remained a 12-storey phalanstery, inspired by the ghost of Fourier, though she sympathises with the ...”

“... in what we can’t prevent ourselves from taking as an authorial discourse on history, with this self-justifying addition: ‘Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.’ This is what Barnes himself, in this book, attempts. He fabulates this and that, stitches the fabulations together, and then he and we quite properly ...”

“... and eats most of her husband’s. Does it tell us something about Miss Bergman’s capacity for self-deception that she could neither leave Alan Burgess alone to write her biography nor sit down and write her own? Instead, they did it together, the actress and the author. Mr Burgess wrote The Small Woman, from which Miss Bergman’s 41st film, The Inn of ...”

“... often sounds like a character in a comic novel. His own. Roger Barlow in Seventy-Two Virgins is a self-portrait that reveals a surprising degree of self-awareness:Barlow’s thoughts of political extinction had taken a philosophical turn. Did it matter? Of course not. The fate of the human race was hardly affected … In ...”

“... idea of living in an apartheid state. They will continue to resist Israel’s efforts to deny them self-determination. What is happening in Gaza is one dimension of that resistance. Another is Mahmoud Abbas’s plan to ask the UN General Assembly on 29 November to recognise Palestine as a non-member state. This move worries Israel’s leaders, because it could ...”

“... of something tiny which has powerfully affected the modern sensibility’. Conducing to ‘anxious self-awareness’ and ‘secret but overriding self-contempt’, it may even have contributed to Eliot’s creating of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. And ‘it would be depressing to estimate the amount of uniquely ...”

“... romances, but the hero’s very first speech, when he offers to take on the adventure, displays a self-possession which seems anything but adolescent. Indeed, he is less self-possessed at the end of the story than at the beginning. Most romances, as Dr Brewer rightly says, achieve a straightforward happy ending, but in Sir ...”

“... baker’s daughter – it is also him. The theme was for Picasso the equivalent of Rembrandt’s self-portraiture: a means of unflinching self-examination, which could speak to the entanglement of creative work with desire, virility, love and cruelty. In the late works, it becomes a way to think about age, doubt, absurdity ...”

“... is more ‘grown-up’ than she seems. These won’t last, Trevor mournfully insists, except by self-delusion, and he is never quite sure whether he thinks self-delusion is to be reverenced or deplored. In one story, for example, he has a newly-married couple quarrelling about the wife’s fondness for teddy-bears: she ...”

“... the Tam Lin poet, took the poet of ‘Jellon Grame’, and took my friend ‘Henri de Beaufort’, self-styled, who introduced me first to Jeanne Duval, leaving me no way back, while Baudelaire brayed from his deathbed – merde merde merde– and took Kirsten Flagstad who delivered up Kindertotenlieder, a gift outright, the radio on as I leant from my bedroom ...”