“... to what you might call the terse tendency in painting – the ethos pivoted on impact, economy and self-possessed cool that you can trace back to Manet and ultimately Velázquez. A tendency rather than a tradition, I’d guess: maybe Katz picked up parts of his own version from Americans such as Milton Avery, but it seems he largely invented his attitude from ...”

“... she leaps forward to the ‘photo-work’ that started in the 1970s – a return to historically self-conscious picture-making epitomised by artists such as Jeff Wall. The point of the experiment remains to bring out whatever those medium-specific values might be. The inclusion of a few canvases sets up interesting tensions. George Frederic Watts may have ...”

“... was extremely reluctant to call for military help. A socialist, he opposed the existence of the Self-Defence Forces as being illegal under the constitution the American occupiers had drafted in 1947. Rescue offers from abroad became similarly ensnared in red tape. The UK was told that its sniffer dogs, trained to find people trapped under rubble, would ...”

“... on Poetry in the 17th Century’. At the kitchen table of our flat in City Road she discovered the self-conscious relation between theory and practice in poem after poem of that period: with cheerful greed she devoured the entire work of people like Cowley, Davenant and Waller, literally having them for breakfast between slices of toast. This was not ...”

“... reinterprets two famous cases of political misdemeanour as prototypes of media disrespect, or ‘self-delusion’ as he calls it, in Britain and the United States: respectively, the Profumo affair and Watergate. Funny that. After all, the editor of Private Eye wasn’t the one sleeping with the girlfriend of a Russian diplomat and lying to the House of ...”

“... of small differences, and sometimes of the surprising width of expressive power achievable within self-imposed limits. It also makes repetition, even mass production, easy – to the point where, in Damien Hirst’s dot paintings, the trademark becomes the work. So Clough, who seems constantly to have reinvented herself, who could make a picture covered in ...”

“... of the private, the transient, and the prostrate. If it is not actually purposeless, it should be self-fulfilling. We might even say that a non-work seems less a thing than a person, because, unlike the fixed and impervious sculpture, it has a material presence that seems improbably alive. Hesse spoke of the non-work as ‘everything and yet nothing’. Ashes ...”

“... the historical intersections between British imperial history and the vicissitudes of Palestinian self-determination. No one in government wants to remember the Armistice of Mudros – which was signed by the British government and the Ottoman Empire two weeks before the general armistice in 1918 and paved the way for the establishment of the British Mandate ...”

“... to turn the figure round: it’s difficult to name anyone who has had more influence on British self-understanding than Tom Nairn. It’s more than forty years since The Break-Up of Britain was published. Its presentation of the United Kingdom as an archaic, dysfunctional structure, pre-modern in its foundation and unfit to survive in a post-imperial ...”

“... status acquired in public service leveraged for private gain. With their lofty commentary and self-promotion, they seem more likely to intensify than to counter cynicism about and distrust in our institutions. It’s not that the distrust isn’t merited, but that the leisurely dad gab (‘It’s an opportunity for me to talk boringly about things like ...”

“... Being a species with no fur, scales or feathers, oddly disposed hair and unique self-consciousness about our sexual parts, we turn to clothes. Clothes, by clinging, squeezing, covering, exposing, draping and padding, by following the body here and billowing away from it there, by making what is round straight, what is soft firm and what is dull bright, offer a critical commentary on the flesh beneath ...”

“... would make his literary reputation. The descendant of non-practising German Jews and of a Swedish self-converted Jewish grandfather, Nelson Algren Abraham grew up among the Chicago Catholic working class and not in an immigrant Jewish community. Although he dropped the name Abraham in the Forties, inside his tough guy persona was a Jewish boy – like the one ...”

“... that part of it, in particular, which is premised on conceptions of the divided or multiple self and can be referred to as the literature of romantic duality. One of the books is fiction – of a kind, however, which is often investigated for its affinity to fact; while the other records the facts and feelings and constructions of the biographer of a ...”

“... here who ‘had not turned to Christ’. His message scathed me like a searchlight. With the self-consciousness of adolescence, it was always I who had not turned to Christ. The fear produced slyness, or suspicion. I noted that no sick person was ever healed of anything, despite the laying on of hands, the prayers. Indeed, one of the kindest and gentlest ...”

“... sanity with one of his friends leading to Nietzsche’s hospitalisation in 1889. Burckhardt’s self-deprecation may not always have been in earnest, but he was modest enough to see that the philosopher’s effusiveness had crossed a line. ‘There is nothing in the world I fear more,’ he wrote, ‘than being overestimated.’ Reading Greek Cultural ...”