“... at large; yet sometimes too it seems to come from within. Here Sherman shows her subjects to be self-surveyed, but in a mode less of narcissistic absorption than of psychological estrangement. Thus in the distance between made-up woman and her mirrored face in Untitled Film Still #2 (1977), Sherman points to the gap between the imagined and actual ...”

“... they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?’ A claim to fame, a piece of flattery, grounds for self-congratulation, a temporising tactic, and an instance of absurd life imitating absurd art: this is a lot of work for a single phrase to do, yet none of it encompasses or even looks at the meaning of the phrase. The camps just flicker there in the ...”

“... that the archives in Istanbul have been opening up. Among the Turkish public at large, the old self-pitying, self-heroising patriotic myths remain entrenched. Popular literature and school textbooks paint a very misleading picture of what happened and help foment the sort of extremism that led to the murder of the ...”

“... how the site is run and being used. Haughey’s original idea was that MetaFilter would be self-policing. Members themselves would keep the standard high and the crap out, by making it painfully clear in their responses when a post wasn’t good enough or a stupid comment was derailing the conversation. But it was always Haughey’s website and he had ...”

“... ladies come and sew their days away, and sometimes their nights. Another fine scene shows the self-adulation of the industry. A woman with enough money to buy a Woodcock dress but not enough manners not to get drunk on her wedding night has her dress stripped from her as she snores. The formerly staring girl, now Woodcock’s model and ...”

“... Expressionist painting that a new generation has written all over, and a shameless piece of self-promotion: Basquiat was equalled only by Warhol in his ability to capitalise on the absurdity of the contemporary art scene. Complicating this is the narrative he brought as a black artist to American brands and products, many of them, like sugar and ...”

“... played by Nora Hamzawi; various eating and drinking pals of theirs – are so resolute in their self-absorption, their unwillingness to listen to anyone else, least of all one another, that to assemble them amounts to criticism of a class. No one in this film is going anywhere. Their world may not even die; it could just be parked in a side street, like a ...”

“... of Art, and on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris until 27 February, sweeps away the self-effacing acronyms. ‘I want to make myself available to myself,’ Mitchell explained to Sandler, as she described her intuitive process. She would begin by sketching charcoal forms onto unstretched canvas, then proceed to layer paint in her distinctive ...”

“... and protects the inner world of diaspora subjectivity, acting as a hollow shell that allows the self a contemplative space of melancholy in which to count its losses and hence come to terms with them’. There is a tension in what have we here? between what Mercer calls the ‘signifying indirection’ of Locke’s baroque and the straightforwardness of the ...”

“... you’re in the wrong movie. The illustration of the rule in the new film is Frank trying out a self-driving car that Cane has given him. He sits in the vehicle and says, ‘Go back thirty yards.’ The car does as it is told. Unfortunately, nobody tells it that it’s still linked to a pump at the petrol station and also connected to the wall of a ...”

“... as a poem that seems to speak, with heightened eloquence, to the reader’. For Prins, the ‘self-defacing’ logic of Fragment 31 – the poet’s tongue is ‘broken’, yet through the art of the translator, who reconstitutes and reorganises her scattered parts, we seem nonetheless to hear her ‘voice’ – haunts Sappho’s literary afterlife as ...”

“... That could only be done when men reformed themselves to do their duty to God, to neighbour and to self. More’s arguments, heavily salted with abuse after the manner of the time, are couched in Latin, so as to contain the dispute among those who could read that language: ‘Quid respondet frater, pater, potator?’ What answer from this crapulous father ...”

“... several, including Cecilia and Belinda, have significant relations to Clarissa; Mary Brunton’s Self-Control, from first chapter to last, constitutes a stage in the debate over seduction which, rightly or wrongly, always came back to Clarissa. It is plain that most interested women believed that Richardson had articulated the significant issues and laid ...”

“... is literally more narratological than those modern works we figuratively designate as self-conscious or reflexive: ‘Hearing himself refer to himself as Joe slapped him in the face with the realisation that this was not simply a similar scene, but the same scene he had lived through once before – save that he was living through it from a ...”

“... last stanza of ‘Water’ (1954) fuses priest and poet with a solemnity only faintly touched with self-mockery: I should raise in the east A glass of water Where any-angled light Would congregate endlessly. ‘Water’ and ‘High Windows’, written 13 years apart, are just alike enough in their endings to make their differences striking. The last lines of ...”