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“... Howard’s A Beautiful Mind were like being in a pretty good spy movie with Ed Harris. This time self-reflexivity takes an extra step. What we have are inserts of ancient footage of, among other long-gone events, the crucifixion, the Crusades, the fall of the Roman Empire, the massacre of the Templars, and the Council of Nicaea. It’s all a little grey and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fight. Since he has a better seat than the top Mafia man (played in a mode of outrageous self-parody by Armand Assante), and more important, since he is dressed like a gangster, the police know this otherwise invisible man must be up to something. There is a parallel to Lucas’s life of denial, and this is the curious double-standard story of Richie ...”

“... Importance of Being Earnest), and he does something very few actors can do: deliver portentous and self-pitying lines (‘Spider-Man will always have enemies’) not as if he believes in them but as if he knows that everything means something to somebody. Jonathan Lethem, writing about Spider-Man in these pages, reported on the child in the cinema who ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Party’s least attractive peculiarities is its restlessness when deprived of opportunities for self-flagellation. Last week’s by-elections saw the party achieve a staggering swing to overturn a 20,000-vote majority in Selby and Ainsty, and come tantalisingly close to taking Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where the Tory majority is now only 495. The Liberal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... belonging, are more and more often experienced as matters of choice. Things which once seemed self-evident – how to feed and educate a child, how to proceed in sexual seduction, how and what to eat, how to relax and amuse oneself – have now been ‘colonised’ by reflexivity, and are experienced as something to be learned and decided on. The retreat ...”

“... the judgments of admirers, concentrating on any who had a literary name. In the poised, archly self-deprecating preface that he had written for the edition of his collected Works that he had published while still in his twenties, he had accepted the slings and arrows of the literary life with a mock sigh. I believe, if any one, early in his life should ...”

“... of an unreliable witness whose claims are to be duly cross-questioned and judged by some higher, self-validating discourse of truth. But reflection on the status of the courtroom officials suggests that this authority of law (or reason) may be exposed to further complications. To inquire where the ultimate verdict derives from – the quaestio quid juris of ...”

“... had a peculiar accent: ‘Perhaps Polish Jew?’ Deborah Baker suggests that it may have been her self-consciousness about her accent that caused Riding, many years later, to talk about poetry as a place ‘where the fear of speaking in strange ways could be left behind’ and ‘as a way of speaking differently from the untidy speaking ways of ordinary ...”

“... merely the establishment of areas of life which governments and laws must not enter, but political self-government or (what Skinner apparently takes to be the same thing) political equality. Berlin, suggests Skinner, was mistaken in taking himself to be carrying out a ‘purely neutral task’ of ‘philosophical analysis’. Rather, he was endorsing a view ...”

“... bystanders who had been stressed beyond endurance by events and become ‘pusillanimous and often self-tormenting’, lapsing into ‘a dark despondency of the soul alternating with terror or rage’. Pinel, the first in the emerging profession of psychiatry to speculate on the effect of revolution on a nation’s mental health, was confronted with a paradox ...”

“... each other’s souls,’ Lord Charles Beresford said. Their children, buoyant on champagne and self-belief, were the first to turn against them. ‘Their minds are almshouses [for] outworn notions and wrinkled phrases,’ Raymond Asquith, Margot’s stepson, sneered. ‘We do not hunt the carted hares of thirty years ago. We do not ask ourselves and one ...”

“... but surpass it when the war was over, going on to gain world fashion dominance with its noble, self-respecting styles. Never a word appeared about what the clothes should look like; no analysis was made of which shapes, colours and textures or ways of composing and wearing them might make German frocks eclipse Paris frocks in the postwar world. Guenther ...”