“... he has not remarried and his daughter is now merely the old maid who puts up with his drunken self-pity and barked commands. Our hero, Hirayama, played by Chishû Ryû, is being nagged by his friend to avoid this fate, and above all avoid this fate for his daughter; and he does, but he takes a long time to come to his decision, he doesn’t have any ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the hang exactly as he arranged it in 1932. The bearded, pale, emaciated young artist in a self-portrait of 1901 looks down on a selection of portraits of his family: his future wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, in a painting from 1917, surrounded by images of their son, Paul, from the 1920s. On the opposite wall, three works hung together ...”

“... unloving wife because of their damaged youngest daughter. Davis meets the girl, an echo of her old self, when she returns to Jaquith’s facility, and effectively adopts her. This makes her Henreid’s wife in spirit without his getting a divorce. This is what she means by their having the stars. Henreid isn’t thrilled but knows he mustn’t argue. Davis ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Idly turning over the stacks, I unguardedly exclaimed: ‘Golly. A whole big thing on Jewish self-hatred,’ ‘And that’s only volume one!’ he returned, fighting to control the look of wolfish conceit at such an easy score. I cursed inwardly. And now here is my revenge, ready to hand. In Lost Property, Ben does his best to get his truest friends to ...”

“... and reassert ourselves, rejecting those foreign bodies as we sharpen and restore our sense of self’. But perhaps the sense of self is never sufficient, the roles never so secure as with Mavis and the Colonel. Perhaps what is missing is simply religious faith – which the Irish, always having had more of, always miss ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mind is almost its own subject, where the place of narrative or character is mostly taken by the self-conscious or self-delighting mind, and where you yourself are put in mind of the quivery automatic graph-paper machines that register earthquakes or the humidity in museums (seismometers or hygrometers), is demanding to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... interiority. In Zidane, the relentless scrutiny of his face yields little in the way of an inner self, still less anything that would help us to account for his sublime skill. We feel for him, but do not identify with him; he is alone, lonely even, and distant, other. Gordon’s film wouldn’t have been given a cinema release – his work is normally shown ...”