“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”