“... be time to retire this little observation. Like Dave Eggers, Smith is interested in contemporary self-consciousness. Insofar as she is a moralist, she is a moralist about this. She is always pointing out that her characters, on the brink of a momentous access of feeling, are undermined by their sense that they are not being original, that TV has preceded ...”

“... held out. We’re a-helping Lyra,’ Hester says. ‘Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.’ Pullman’s range of emotional registers is immense. He can describe and attach value to tidying up your room, as when Lyra runs off with the Gyptians (who travel in long-boats) and has to ...”

“... to me, ugly in their strangeness.’ Though Javo’s strangeness marks a banishment of the self to some deep and unknowable realm of experience, Nora traces that absence on the surfaces of his face: on his extravagantly burned, scarred skin; into his violently blue eyes, their pupils wide and whited out by dope; across the ridges of his skull and his ...”

“... fashionable clutter, there reigned ‘a sober solemnity … a softened and subdued light illumined self-communion’. Rapture was only achieved through unrelenting physical effort, to the point of exhaustion, expressive less of passion than of rage. Delacroix’s building had been a gymnasium, and Baudelaire imagined him locked in athletic combat with the ...”

“... to a woman he hopes to make his lover. He wishes to explain himself, and embarks on a Rousseauian self-analysis that occupies all but the final pages of the novel. Though Félix comes from an aristocratic family, he has much in common with Balzac: he is an overlooked younger son, and endured a lonely and miserable childhood, neglected by a cold, distant ...”

“... 1675), commits to a tactic he had earlier only toyed with: to set an internal picture as a wholly self-contained block within his own composition, uninterrupted by foreground forms. Thus we see a rectangular firewall of gilt mouldings isolating a bucolic vista from the surrounding whitewash. The landscape is distanced – a hillside looked down on, its little ...”

“... Highdown Hill and sits in the open air. In The Child that Books Built (2002), Francis Spufford’s self-portrait of the author as reader, he tracks his journey from picture books to teenage comics and his first encounters with pornography. His childhood was lonely because there was sickness in the house: his baby sister had cystinosis, a rare genetic ...”

“... its thrust – would have been that, just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, which is a self-evident fact, so you shouldn’t base your opinion of anything else on surfaces or first impressions: you can’t judge an accused man by his physiognomy. Fine. But as the number of books jostling for readers’ attention has grown, publishers have toiled to ...”

“... rather two), ‘there is no meaning but something like a dream of meaning.’ Snatches of self-reflexive commentary are scattered throughout: The sentences not only undergo the normal deprivation of their intrinsic value and communication capacity but acquire acceleration and a centripetal and centrifugal force at the same time. It’s obvious that ...”

“... this, holding out against the dread prospect of statutory regulation. However, several bits of self-serving chaff get thrown into the picture here. One is the idea that journalists, as self-styled talkers of truth to power, should be above the law – the law against bribing the police, for example, or breaching ...”

“... people and a few stray hippies, putting it all together with a poem by Allen Ginsberg in a self-published book. Rineke Dijkstra’s large-format full-length portraits of girls in Liverpool in 1995 announce a sudden shift in scale. Dressed for a night out at the Buzz Club they stand fidgety and self-conscious, not ...”

“... be the intention, or part of it, though it would be foolish to claim to know what motivates such self-disfigurement. From the outside, however, he looks like a ghoul, a monstrous apparition, the Ghost of Celebrity Future. As he sang in ‘Thriller’, ‘Night creatures call/And the dead start to walk in their masquerade/There’s no escaping the jaws of the ...”

“... of Hollis Brown’, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ or ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. It is also self-evidently and self-consciously fictive. Many of the recollections are too detailed to be plausible as unadorned memories (whatever they are). Before explaining that he’d travelled to New York from the Midwest in the back ...”

“... who had no claim to it. Of course he doesn’t himself make this point; he must have thought it self-evident. To talk thus may be thought fuddy-duddy, but the question is not about manners, which have changed in matters of this kind, but about truth, or at any rate about accuracy. ‘Morgan’ gives a false impression of the relationship between the ...”

“... frozen routines and discourses needing ludic disassembly. These plays run the gamut of the self-conscious genres, from Paid on Both Sides (subtitled ‘A Charade’) and Enemies of a Bishop (‘A Morality in Four Acts’) through to the most portentously earnest and last of the plays, On the Frontier (1938), which as if in an act of final disowning is ...”