“... 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 ...”

“... Dreyman himself has when he finds out. So has Wiesler conformed at last, returned to his old Stasi-self, saved his skin? He has asked all the questions his old self would have asked, and got the answers that self would have needed, but his subsequent behaviour is different, and provides ...”

“... emerged of poor food, unsanitary conditions, protests, mental health crises, hunger strikes and self-harm (there are similar reports from Penally, a former army training centre in Pembrokeshire which is being used to house Iraqi and Iranian asylum seekers, and RAF Coltishall in Norfolk, where around forty Iranian and Iraqi asylum seekers have been held ...”

“... we get is the person objectified rather than an expressed personality. The look in the eye, the self-presenting stance – the kind of thing Sargent looked for – is missing. Even Nicholson’s large group portrait of the Canadian Headquarters Staff – painted during or just after the war – reads as a scene happened upon. Three of the six figures are in ...”

“... chalk became his materials. Without anyone to paint he turned to himself. ‘I did draw one or two self-portraits before,’ he later said, ‘but I’ve always felt there was something a bit banal about doing self-portraits. I didn’t find actual formal components of my head all that interesting when I was ...”

“... skin a kid rips from a smelly, smashed elder-branch? Now that the academies are switching into self-destruct and gibberwick I’ve fallen in love again with a rich old library and those darkblue bindings; I’m bending the knee now to letter and copy-text, the fine print of the ...”

“... counselling take place on television. We all encounter electronically these days. Celebrities are self-protective. Unless they are George Best, they know not to give too much away. ‘Ordinary folk’ are innocents in the business of self-exposure, which is why they’re much in demand. They flutter to the studio lights ...”

“... phrase like that would be a family treasure. But Osborne’s humour is aggressive, not black, not self-deprecating, not tolerant; it makes the world a harder place. The letters make the memoirs easier for the reader, however: one looks forward to them. In the days of heady fame – of Broadway and the Royal Court, of pursuit by the press, of ...”