“... similar diary of his Venetian stay seems to have been lost); and a riveting sequence of self-portraits in paint and in pen and ink, including drawings of his left hand and a full-length depiction of himself in the nude. He also wrote several poems of middling quality and copious notes and texts on art theory. Near the end of his life he published ...”

“... these intellectual capacities had to be turned towards the systematic debunking of superficially self-evident ideas – with the existence of God once again as exhibit A. Language itself, readers had to be taught, was inherently deceptive and subject to abuse. D’Holbach began to apply this idea to politics, claiming that ‘the true principles of politics ...”

“... have no doubt tended to think that Kabbalism encourages superstition, emotionalism and self-indulgence. Much the same could be said of the flower people of the 1960s, who were also hankering after forms of religion with a dash of oriental extravagance about them. It was a suspect strain in Bloom, that his Kabbalism met the emotionalism of the ...”

“... and that notoriety tends to deter readers who might have tried, so that the legend is self-perpetuating. On all sides, it is acknowledged as some sort of masterpeice, but it is clear that not all who praise have actually read it, because they are often uncertain about its format, having probably read only Edward Garnett’s dim-witted ...”

“... arm of a heavily beringed dress designer: a man, it appears, of active sensuality verging on self-indulgence. Now compare the Irving Penn photograph for the back jacket of Music for Chameleons. Emaciated fingers delicately support a frail skull: without their help, you feel, the head might simply snap off. One hand, indeed, supplies the vertical ...”

“... type of novelist (and had something of the same order of talent) as the Old Firm, writers whose self-conscious dandy persona pervades their work, who cannot detach their own personality from the world they have created, who, indeed, are always in danger in real life of being swallowed by their creations. With Kennaway, though the rhythms tend to be ...”

“... even a public deceitfulness, but rather that the high-minded propounders of liberal ideals, the self-satisfied advocates of ‘procrustean virtue’, as he occasionally puts it, are self-deceived. But, once more, if that implies, as it surely must, that they are blinded to the reality of the world, then we need a rather ...”

“... a governing metaphor for omniscient narration. Plot becomes a tussle between individuals’ self-command and the planetary formations that determine essential facts about their nature: what look like deeply improbable, chance happenings – a bullet wound springing up out of nowhere on a ghostly figure’s chest; an illiterate woman suddenly being able ...”

“... and another Frenchman who proved it for the English. As Punch wrote after Alexis Soyer’s self-imposed slavery in the Crimea on behalf of his adopted country: The Cordon Bleu to the War is gone,     In the ranks of death you’ll find him. His snow-white apron is girded on     And his magic stove behind him. ‘Army beef,’ says the Cordon ...”

“... be faulted for glossing over the scrounging, the fiddling, the fecklessness, the delinquency, the self-deception and the wilful irrationality which are as authentic a part of the picture as the unmerited hardships, the gratuitous humiliations and the irremediable, self-perpetuating lack of opportunities for ...”

“... any rate. Yet his conclusion is caustic: In the poetic tradition now dominant the authoritative self, discoursing in a world of banal, empirically derived objects and relations, depends on its employment of metaphor and simile for poetic vitality ... Poets are now praised above all else as inventors of figures – as rhetoricians, in fact – with a ...”

“... does seem to relate to the way Bainbridge’s characters often encounter death when they’re most self-absorbed, most taken up with the temporary distractions of life. Chance tears through this false reality, revealing a world of instability and mortality. In some ways, it isn’t surprising that these themes are more prominent in Master Georgie than they ...”

“... music of an early morning band achieved nothing which could not have been induced by exercising self-discipline at home, taking plenty of baths and drinking water from the tap, with perhaps the odd pinch of salts from the apothecary. But the water-doctors who battened on the spa trade spread the notion that self-treatment ...”

“... occupied by them for a century and a half; it survived thereafter only by being incorporated as a self-governing unit into the Habsburg Empire, benefiting from Habsburg military protection but successfully resisting administrative rationalisation. As anomalous exemplars of what might be called ‘state-unbuilding’, Poland and Hungary have been conveniently ...”

“... 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 ...”