“... and finally in his own (he does later admit to his departure), must first collapse into a weeping, self-accusing heap and then get a second chance: not to prove his courage but to hoist the masculinity myth back into place. He rescues Ebba in the snow (even if he does have to abandon the children to do it), and sympathises with her when she too becomes afraid ...”

“... a Church (c.1905) to the Klimt-esque Shroud of Christ (1908); from the sensuous fluidity of the Self-Portrait (1908-10), which would recall Gauguin were it not for Malevich’s unmistakeable blunt stare, to the green-grey tones – Malevich later called it ‘Cézannism’ – of Landscape (1911). The succession of idioms is striking for its speed: months ...”

“... of the impossible. This film is a story of a woman in a man’s world. Chastain is too tight and self-contained for anyone to feel sorry for her, and she certainly doesn’t feel sorry for herself. When she is first allowed to attend a meeting with Gandolfini – that is, to sit off at some distance in the same room with him – she answers his ...”

“... Michael Douglas as Liberace acts up onstage and off, twinkles with a coy kindness that is all self-admiration but quite fetching even so; Damon is bewildered and wary and captivated in just the right proportions, and his shift from baffled gay guy into trinketed and tinted toy boy is beautifully done. Both actors, throughout the movie, manage to hang on ...”

“... He sees the gap between what he is saying and what he pretends to be saying. His irony affords no self-criticism, but it is full of leering self-awareness. The film has none of this, no contrition or glee or reflection, and in certain respects it is remarkably austere. This is in large part why viewers’ reactions have ...”

“... from 1937, eventually precipitating a clash with the US. For conservatives, the war of national self-defence began in December 1941 when Japan, suffering terribly under American sanctions, fought back by launching an attack on Pearl Harbor. On 14 August, in a statement to mark the 70th anniversary of surrender, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe surprised nobody but ...”

“... Prints​ are defined by their reproducibility, but the monotype is self-destructive, its printable design effaced after one or two passes through a press. Since the printmaker neither etches nor engraves into the plate, but merely draws or paints directly onto its surface, the transfer of ink from plate to paper can only truly be made once (as the ‘mono’ in monotype suggests ...”

“... Israel’s violation of human rights but to join the Palestinian people in their struggle for self-determination. For a number of years, I spent most weekends with Ta’ayush in the West Bank; during the week I would write about our activities for the local and international press. My pieces caught the eye of a professor from Haifa University, who wrote a ...”

“... to yourself: I’m me.’ Hujar’s subjects seem to have heeded the same advice: they exhibit a self-possession tending to the monumental. You can see it in his 1981 portrait of the actor Madeline Kahn. Hujar posed her in an empty studio, wrapped in a hulking, dark coat: she looks like a solid black mass from which face, hands and legs emerge. The ...”

“... changing the church’s approach to social issues; conservatives tend to see it as a sad loss of self-confidence, degrading a rich and beautiful tradition and setting the church adrift. Mixed positions, which combine progressive social views with affection for traditional forms (or vice versa), are much rarer than they are in the Church of England.Francis at ...”

“... and rhetorical skill; he was also the model for Milton’s belief that to be a poet required self-restraint and, above all, chastity (the young Virgil was known as Parthenias or ‘virgin’).McDowell discusses Milton’s early education, especially the influence of his teachers – first Young, then Alexander Gil (father and son) at St Paul’s, then ...”

“... we want to take certain lives and kinds of art – and how we take them seriously without self-referencing the life out of them, without deadening the very things that constitute their once bright, now frazzled eros and ethos. One of the big differences between Bowie’s heyday in the 1970s and now is that today you can choose from a huge selection of ...”

“... hoarding flies, reducing his handsome accommodations to a warehouse, caring only to measure his self-contentment by the quantity of his acquisitions, was surely crazy. To remain indifferent to the interests or opinions of others, except when to consult them might mean an increase to his store, the encroaching measure of his own greatness: to live thus was ...”

“... Autobiography of Alice B. as a crucial document in the history of Modernist fashioning and self-fashioning – the story of Axel’s tower or Babel’s, told in the first person. It should also make us think yet again about the legacy of cultural Modernism – and about its relationship to the larger fate of Europe in mid-century. The Man from ...”