“... posed for one of the works, undoubtedly an Individual of Style. The Gap ads breezily promised that self-expression could be found in a shared vocabulary of commodities. Artworks, both bound to and in flight from the commodity form, require artists to cultivate a loving hatred of art – not least, de Land thought, because the erotic charge of this ambivalence ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”