“... the power of Munch’s Scream embedded in a singing birthday card. All this is in the name of ‘self-evident common sense’ (always a worrying claim) for which she is the self-ordained champion. Scientism has attempted to mystify the common sense that belongs to ‘ordinary people’. The intelligentsia, who are ...”

“... of publication at the beginning of September. Her pain levels are out of control; rage, jealousy, self-pity, self-flattery and malice are the indices, on every page. This isn’t a book so much as a casualty struggling to rise to its feet but disabled by the fury of its author. François Hollande is the target: he was ...”

“... height of the neo-Jacobitism [sic], a Romantic-Decadent movement which reacted against cynical and self-interested influences in … contemporary politics’. No wonder it was still going. From Wikipedia I learned that it was one of the less militant groups to have revered the martyr-king at that time: in 1893, a ‘considerable detachment of police’, sent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... four inches high. ‘Glad you could make it. Glad in more ways than one,’ said Martin in his self-consciously deep voice. ‘Usually I drop down to the floor on a thread of cotton at about this time and start for the kitchen in the hope of getting a drink by dusk. But I’ve lost the thread. Lost the thread in more ways than one, I thought, Martin, old ...”

“... and designed in one. ‘My Marilyn’ (1965). Hamilton explored the new relay between self and image directly in his own version of the ultimate Pop icon, Marilyn Monroe, made after his first visit to the United States in 1963, where he travelled with his friend Marcel Duchamp, and met Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and other young bucks ...”

“... Balefulness was his forte, and a score of shades of desperation and fury are evoked by the self-portrait canvases on view in Tate Modern, from the surly teenager of 1882 to the withered streak of personal persistence stood ‘between the clock and the bed’ a year or two before his death. The curators rather skew their fascinating revisionist exercise ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... figures. ‘Plamen was a light showing us a way forward,’ Dimitar Dimitrov, who survived his own self-immolation attempt on 13 March, told me when I visited him at his wife’s cabin in the rural region of Silistra, where he is convalescing. ‘The thing that surprised me most was that the pain hit me instantly,’ Dimitrov said, remembering the day when he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”