“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I pray​ every day that super-intelligent aliens will come to earth and save us from self-destruction, so when an 800-metre-long cigar-shaped object was found to have hurtled into our solar system I felt a stirring of hope. It was picked up on 19 October by the Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) at the University of Hawaii’s Astronomical Institute ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour.The first and second of these examples assume that Israel, apart from being a Jewish state, is a country like any other and so open only to criticism resembling ...”

“... and example. The mother is closer to Mycroft than we might think, and one of her lessons is that self comes first and last, however much we may be tempted by the idea of sacrifice for others. Enola, debating this with herself and us, thinks the advice is often correct, but can’t always be followed. If she followed it, she would have left the marquess to ...”

“... means. It is, after all, a zombie who is dying, a man who personifies an eerie sacrifice of the self to bureaucracy – or, less sympathetically, the use of bureaucracy as an enduring assertion of a controlling self. And this is why, in Living as in Ikiru, our hero dies a while before the end of the film.There are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the book appeared, ‘for I can only call it that.’ In fact it was an instance of the benign self-interest that makes a far-sighted publisher succeed. As poet laureate Betjeman was worth his weight in Bovril. Over its long life John Murray produced not only new books, but whole new genres. The famous red Murray’s handbooks were the original foreign ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been able to fix things if she had known. Cathy, like a lot of people in this film, suffers from a self-absorption that means she’s incapable of imagining the way other people think or feel. The second half of the movie abounds in examples of this. If we want to consider for a moment how widespread the tendency is, we might turn to Nelly’s comments on ...”