“... 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 ...”

“... to scorn the efforts of anyone who just dabbles, particularly if the dabbling looks like academic self-promotion. Significantly, those who have made a real difference to Ruskin studies over the past 20 years have not come from within the British university system. The courageous work of Helen Gill Viljoen, first of those who dared to challenge the magisterial ...”

“... lost skills and teaching all kinds of restoration. After initial problems, this became a self-supporting success. When James died in 1984, Monkton and its surrounding acres reverted to the trust and were sold off to provide further capital – despite some opposition from those who wished to preserve it as a Surrealist monument. Its owner was buried ...”

“... about the Labour Party suddenly has a fresh and convincing answer: John Smith, the elected leader, self-evidently calls the shots. No doubt he would have preferred, in time-honoured style, to stitch up the block votes in advance behind his rule changes, had he been able to do so. Instead, he found the consolation of demonstrating his mettle in the initially ...”

“... noses (we can decipher his will to manipulation without such help), but to lend him the gift of self-commentary. At one point he tries on a striped waistcoat worn in a film of The Fall of the House of Usher. ‘ “I like,” he said obscurely, “I like – you know – to slip in and out of me ... Me and not-me.” ’ But this is not quite ...”

“... is exacerbated by Selbourne’s ostentatious contempt for his intellectual betters and a degree of self-regard that the author of a much better book than this would have no title to. ‘Given the scale of the moral and social crises which beset us,’ says Selbourne, can we turn (in a brute world) for guidance, ethical or practical, to an Isaiah Berlin, a ...”

“... to say and said it.’ How you value that process depends on how you value that form of deliberate self-expression – so popular in the 20th century – which contains a large element of the mere expression of opinion. Speaking of Aldington, among others, Wyndham Lewis fairly says: ‘it is not quite certain that we were not just as big fools as our not very ...”

“... and again about lower-middle-class gentility (rural Canadian rather than urban English), and its self-obsessed obedience. Like his stories, Munro’s are fat with community: her characters steal their lean solitude from the thickness that surrounds them. These thieves struggle against the pieties and self-satisfactions of ...”

“... reciprocity, whose absence haunts each one of us at some level, even prompting fantasies of the self as a surviving twin. The possibility, however fragile, of such an intense and benign duplicity remains a fundamental component of the modern imagination: ‘for some, its very definition’, according to Schwartz. In this charged atmosphere, even World War ...”

“... and guilty desire? I don’t think he has yet quite explained this to us) a complete, unflawed ‘self-presence’, in which there is no place for the morbid and intrusive Other. ‘Self-presence’ is not a very happy nor a readily understandable term, though it is one which both Gasché and Norris frequently find ...”

“... eloquence, for all that, is Prufrock-like, and his stories are finally static and inhibited by self-consciousness. These are funny, despairing vignettes which describe our universe without ever actually daring to disturb it. Dora, one of Kate Pullinger’s protagonists in Tiny Lies, is in the habit of embarking on fact-finding missions. Instead of ...”