It is an excellent novel so long as you are in a sombre, self-scrutinising mood.In "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty", Sebastian Barry, a quasi-biographical playwright ("The Steward of Christendom" and "Our Lady of Sligo") as well as a fine poet and novelist, introduces passionate lyricism into a slab of 20th-century Irish history.
LD Yinka Shonibare was initially drawn to Bjorn Veno's work because, while artists such as Tracey Emin, Cindy Sherman and Paula Rego are renowned for scrutinising the female self in their work, Veno seemed to be the only contemporary male artist doing the equivalent.
A regional consistency panel, routinely convened to scrutinise self-awarded grades, met on 5 November and marked them down in two areas: both from four to three stars in an assessment of how well it was achieving children's "economic wellbeing" and in the capacity to improve.
I remember being made to do a self-portrait and sitting in the bathroom scrutinising my face in the mirror.
Some of his portraits have a startling truthfulness – and that goes for his celebrated last self-portrait, which is scrutinised in this show alongside self-portraits by Turner prize-winner Mark Wallinger.
Scrutinising what it means to be an ally risks self-indulgence: making it about you, rather than about them and their lives.
Unlike self-scrutinising Jane, Thomas fails to examine his own moral centre, and the sudden onset of desire destroys his only way of being.
Like every thinker worth their salt, from his time and before, he was steeped in the classics - he could speak Latin before he could speak French - and conversed with the ancients as we might read the papers; yet he invented an introspective, self-scrutinising style that has remained a model of learned, roundabout thinking aloud for more than 400 years.
Because isn't that exactly what we need writers – the brightest, most adventurous and self-scrutinising ones, like Parks and Roffey – to do: to take that same darkness and turn it into something so blazingly alive that it can shine a little light on the rest of us?
And they have been scrutinising Google too.
