“... la sacra, y Sevilla la grande. Liverpool the impoverished, the liverish, the void, the full, the self-besotted, the blarney-argoted, the blitzed and blackened, the bella-brutta, the rag-rich, the moss-stained sandstoned, the green-lung’d, the ricket-ridden, the loud and adenoidal. Liverpool the last-to-be-served, the least-accounted, the over-arched and ...”

“... achieved on a happiness scale the highest score in decades. Reagan’s popularity and American self-satisfaction have not risen together because of any general improvement in the standard of living: the rich are richer than they were a decade ago, the poor are poorer, and the average American stands about the same. It is not prosperity that accounts for ...”

“... He interposes himself between his text and the reader in an entirely natural way. He is not the self-conscious puppetmaster of so much self-consciously ‘modernistic’ fiction, but a writer painfully aware of material and reader in a way that forces him into a kind of dizzying honesty. Ce qui va suivre est faux et ...”

“... international relations firmly to the other side, whose beliefs were seen as inherently imprudent, self-deceiving and obscurantist and whose odious political practices were seen as linked, logically if somewhat disingenuously, to these same beliefs. The most striking historical claim advanced in The Origins concerned, not the European tradition of professional ...”

“... main subject despite his disclaimer, is an apt martyrdom for the writer, principally because it is self-induced: its sufferers have the luxury of blaming only themselves. It also acts as a literary rite de passage, the rash or chancre symbolising the transition from a deluded innocence to an anxious and often painful maturity. Like the shaman who undergoes a ...”

“... or unmistakably that of a certain academic environment. It has wit, which is sometimes spoiled by self-consciousness; it is convoluted, sometimes to the point of collapsing under the weight of its own ornaments – on nearly every page there are both brilliant throw-away insights and needlessly elaborated trivialities. The arguments are indirect and mostly ...”

“... A modern witch is a Witch. The upper case denotes a self-consciousness born of safer times: Witchcraft is now a minority faith to be taken seriously (at least in the States), and there is even a Witches’ League for Public Awareness. They need it. For the broomsticks, black cats, green-hued hags with pointy hats – all the paraphernalia people remember from childhood – have been joined by rumours about something deeply sinister and very adult going on in the suburbs ...”

“... himself from Bukowski’s persistent aggression, choosing instead to present the haplessly self-parodying aspect of machismo: the machinist who wears a hat saying ‘US Male’ and smokes big cigars and weight-lifts steel bars and arbors while his machine runs. The poet is smiling when he remarks that ‘being a man in a machine shop is not ...”

“... say about the situation before us? Consider, for example, two other recent publications. The Self-Build Book is a theoretical and practical guide to designing and building your own home, based on what Colin Ward calls ‘Anarchism in Action’ – peaceful self-help and direct action within existing society. Class ...”

“... Leiris, Dubuffet, Queneau.Yet if Jarry has lived on it is because of Ubu above all. Ubu was a ‘self-inflicted nightmare’, Jarry admitted, but the romance of self-destruction also enticed him. Although he wasn’t the first to be so seduced – Baudelaire and Rimbaud precede him – he was flagrant about it, and many ...”

“... set of metaphors for Thomas’s poetic procedures: he ‘plunged into the sump of his teenage self, filling his notebooks with druggy, bewildering lines that would be a kind of fossil fuel to him for years to come . . . Thomas had to be toiling in the element of language like a person in a mudbath.’ In a sense, Thomas’s was the wrong kind of ...”

“... or two.I’m ordinarily annoyed by this mode in fiction, but Le Tellier provides us with a wry, self-referential authorial omniscience that justifies it, deftly switching the narrative from person to person, location to location. He also gives us Victor, the authorial stand-in, whose bestselling book is (of course) called The anomaly (lowercase ‘a’) and ...”

“... result was ‘a work that I feel I didn’t make, but that somehow made itself’. The notion of a self-making sculpture seems all the more relevant when we learn that Young Man is the subject of a photographic portfolio conceived in 2013 by the graphic designer Silvia Gaspardo Moro. Taking up the idea of making and ...”

“... dramatic story of fifty years of life that is impressively level, free of blame and accusation and self-pity. The book is composed mainly of short, shuffled scenes and metallic scraps of dialogue. It works forward and flashes back; it begins, one might say, with the bell that announces the last lap in a 1500-metre race. We are most of the way through the ...”

“... or less chronological order across the smaller rooms of the upper floor. In the first gallery, a self-portrait from 1957 shows an 18-year-old Schneemann beginning to reckon with herself. She stands naked, her poised body, recognisable from the hundreds of later performance photographs, bristling with energy. Tense fingers morph into claws, arms multiply. She ...”