“... in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the ...”

“... and partial understanding of aspects of everyday social life, and leads in stages of increasing self-knowledge to a grasp of the totality’ – and to find a place for himself in the emergent modern world. Rose read the Phenomenology, too, as a Bildungsroman,which recapitulates the play of personae – the story of how natural consciousness acquired ...”

“... cannot be taught new tricks – and those they have are all predictable. They guard their kennels self-importantly, mark out their territory in wind and piss, bark righteously for any trifling cause. follow the pack in every bloody thing. All their affection’s of the boisterous kind – they’re awfully free with dandruff, spittle, hair. The eviller ones ...”

“... china hasn’t been auctioned off to keep me at school. Best of all, the Marie Laurencin self-portrait didn’t go down with the rest of the stuff on its way to Portugal. Its brown smudges of eyes look out across the fields as if they were looking into the future. One of our old musicals is playing on the broken radiogram. I lean on the back of the ...”

“... leaves shiver silent chimes beyond the glass brings either the rapture [my children . . .] or self-criticism  of one who comes with a theory [. . . are an economy of scarcity] of myself there is no more evidence to admit – only consistent with limestone’s incessant weeping cave a madonna’s ...”

“... If one turns to what China Diary actually is, one has to say that it is a mildly narcissistic, self-indulgent ramble, quite pleasant to read, and with occasional flashes of insight. Thus Spender remarks that ‘there are times in China when the tourists seem totally disconnected from the places they are visiting... like the plug of the television set in ...”

“... money to a diamond-smuggling stranger from Sierra Leone, who promptly took off with it, as any self-respecting diamond-smuggler would. Whereupon our intrepid autobiographer swore a mighty oath against the smugglers, and rounded up a small army of mercenaries from the bars of Monrovia, who were apparently so impressed with his air of command that they ...”

“... all summer, has often asked himself. We know this because Cummings’s sprawling and fantastically self-revealing blog (still live at the time of writing) is punctuated with thoughts about Bismarck. For Cummings, Bismarck is the sacred monster of tactical politics, the genius statesman whose political moves repeatedly surprised and wrong-footed friends and ...”

“... on the move’, were also the result of a desire to turn the tables on the world. Made to feel self-conscious about her appearance as a child, as an adult she ensured that everyone else should be conscious of it too. Clothes come between the naked self and the world, as does writing. Where the dividing line is drawn ...”

“... Sitwell from 1916. Laura Knight, three years earlier, had been condemned by the Telegraph for a self-portrait with a nude model that lacked ‘the higher charm of the “eternal feminine”’. A few such notable nudes aside, there is a tendency to allegorise lesbian desire in objects and interiors: as in Ethel Sands’s The Chintz Couch of 1911, or the ...”

“... There are artfully self-conscious moments in Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained (1999) which distract us briefly from the film’s amazing achievement: to reveal the last volume of Proust’s intellectual monument (and by implication the rest of the work) for the intricate social soap opera it also is, a universe of stars appropriately represented by Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart and others ...”

“... Elizabeth Leveson-Gower thought it ‘almost a sin’ to see it disappear below the paint. He was self-taught and it was drawing, not painting, that brought the child prodigy to the attention of his father’s patrons in the Black Bear, a coaching inn on the London to Bath road. ‘Not merely the wonder of his family but of the times, for his astonishing ...”

“... shared with the painter Ben Nicholson. The show vividly conjures the studio’s crowded, exuberant self-confidence. Paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, textile designs, collages: all the things they made invent a specific aesthetics of intimacy, a shared exploration of what it means to love and be loved, to feel close and yet distinct, to ...”

“... the two paintings by Gentileschi – A Sibyl is the other one – and his daughter Artemisia’s self-portrait. Without these the exhibition would be significant; with them it is magnificent. As well as paintings there are rooms of drawings. A few, like Michelangelo’s Fall of Phaeton and A Children’s Bacchanal, were presentation pieces, and thus ends in ...”