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“... 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 ...”

“... seemingly describes sex with a man, is followed by ‘The Man’, which seemingly describes a self-satisfied dog; ‘Pussy’ ends on the word ‘poonac’ (a Sri Lankan coconut cake used as animal fodder); in ‘Cloud’, a victim of gang rape is relieved that her attackers weren’t ‘of the opinion that her tits sucked’. In ‘Scratching the ...”

“... stand looking at a gold page from the Aeneid with Dowson directly as soundtrack. Burne-Jones’s self-mockery is very winning; and a quality parallel to self-mockery – a peculiar oscillation between excess and etiolation at the level of form, a threading together of dream-thinness and overcrowding – is what makes ...”

“... strength – making him a sort of liberal alternative to Ayn Rand. It’s a deft and enviable self-placement, but doesn’t make it any easier to characterise him as a writer. Eggers’s bestselling first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a memoir about his parents’ deaths and his guardianship of his younger brother, exemplified ...”

“... was no other way of living, and for most of her life it didn’t make her much of one. A nude self-portrait begun in 1975 (she was born in 1900 so her decades are the century’s decades) shows a different grandmother figure. Her face is rather tight around the mouth, as a painter’s face can be when reaching a decision about just how a detail seen in ...”

“... the alternatives were probably worse. Without regular elections politicians would drift into self-serving cliques that pursued their own interests at the expense of everyone else’s. The only way to hold them to account would be to empower self-styled tribunes of the people to interrogate them before the court of ...”

“... sociobiology of the selfish gene and the American global project of making the world safe for self-interest would impose cognate versions of Western individualism on the rest of humanity. Chagnon poses as a champion of science and contemptuously dismisses his critics as ideologically driven. It’s once more to the epistemological breach: as they have ...”

“... as a man dedicated to the external duties of war and exploration, who kept introspection and self-analysis to a minimum. His blandness makes him an amenably malleable subject for a novelist, and Sten Nadolny has taken full advantage of this licence. Most important, he has endowed his John Franklin with a defining character trait for which there is no ...”