“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a genius for observation that one doesn’t think of as Forsterian. The Bishop-like effacement of self in the presence of the thing described wasn’t natural to Forster, who prefers to stand in front of the picture with his pointer, half-obscuring the image with his amusing conceits on it. In Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘Mr Forster has been apt to pervade ...”