“... lights as part of a royal motorcade. When we arrived, the prince seemed more ruddy-faced and self-alienated than before, and I wondered if words had been exchanged, but I have no evidence and can only say that we walked in procession to Poets’ Corner, surrounded by a very packed house of the clearly-having-been-kept-waiting. Forrest Gump, eat your ...”

“... committed him to being interested in every sort of phenomenon, while the buoyancy of his own self-belief meant that the investigations seldom lapsed into mere principle. Like Leonardo, he thought about morphologies: the way carnivore bodies variegate, for example, in the Tiger, Lion and Leopard Hunt from the Musée des beaux-arts in Rennes, one of two ...”

“... and political. ‘Drawings after Circuit’, 1972. Serra’s drawings are not pure, perfect, self-sufficient, suprematist or minimalist forms; they are built things. They need a bit of packing here, a bit of bog there; they need the viewer to act on them. The earliest work in the exhibition is the text drawing Verb List (1967-68), a lexicon of more than ...”

“... her tics, her drinking, her impatience, her snobbery, is a sort of saga of denial, the ragged, self-contradicting consciousness of someone who can’t afford to think about what she knows. In these last moments of the film, we have to feel something like sympathy for her, what else would we feel? But her story and her condition, even in this ...”

“... exaggerations of broadcasting conventions and their cheerful disdain for moral panics and media self-aggrandisement. Brass Eye was celebrated for hoaxing politicians and celebrities: several hapless Tories, plus Rolf Harris and Noel Edmonds, filmed impassioned warnings against a fictitious drug called ‘cake’ which affected, Edmonds said, ‘the part of ...”

“... But it also seems to chime with the world of social media and online communication, where self-expression rules and echo chambers proliferate. The internet is much more effective as a vehicle for expressing disgust with mainstream politics than it is for organising pragmatic reconfigurations of it. Corbyn might be a reminder of the 1980s in some of ...”

“... romance of the Italian movie, and neither Johnson nor Howard can compete with Hepburn in self-possession – indeed who could? But the sheer misery in the ordinariness of these lives, a grand passion conducted in and out of the dingy buffet bar of a small railway station, is magnetic. Johnson especially is remarkable, telling her story in voice-over ...”

“... Scottish television and being sufficiently aware of their own capabilities to know the dangers of self-determination. But after three excruciating decades, these divisions eventually resolved themselves into a Scottish Parliament which has struggled to live up to expectations. Richard Leonard, elected as the new leader of Scottish Labour last month, ran on a ...”

“... too enthusiastic, too alien – she seems to long to go back to some version of college, to the self-rejuvenating Dawn School, or to Folk School: ‘I am going to Folk School/to learn how to be/one of my people.’ She has a Dionysian desire to dissolve boundaries between persons and longs for the kind of fellowship promised by a church; the trouble is she ...”

“... for stanzas might be somehow related – a stanza being, in Joseph Brodsky’s words, ‘a self-generating device’, and one whose original mnemonic purpose has, for the most part, gone the way of the barouche. On Balance, Sinéad Morrissey’s sixth collection, subjects mechanical devices and engineering marvels to formal constraints ...”

“... a tool for anxiety relief and relaxation, amateur in style but extremely lucrative for independent self-described ASMRtists. For others, it’s a strange and unappealing fetish: a cynical form of ‘digital intimacy’. It’s the best, or the worst, the internet has to offer.Fanatics don’t always agree about what precisely ASMR is. The curators at the ...”

“... character of limited intelligence and scant scruple, remarkable only for his gigantic powers of self-deception. But no amount of academic documentation is likely to dissuade people a hundred years hence from seeing him as the very mirror of a tragic prince – an ikon of modern royalty as exemplified by Sickert’s dazzling portrait painted, at the time of ...”

“... like the gallery, is devoted to Art Brut, a movement that insists on the value of art made by self-taught artists, including patients in psychiatric hospitals. I visited the exhibition by accident, wandering in during a weekend in Paris, and found pictures of tree roots made up of twisted and tortured bodies; of Adam and Eve stripped of their skin, so ...”

“... diametric contrast stands the characteristic tone of native commentary. Most languages have some self-critical locution, usually a wordplay or neologism, to indicate typical national defects. Germans can cite Hegel’s contemptuous description of local identity politics, Deutschdumm; the French deplore the vauntings of franchouillardise; Peruvians term a ...”

“... white mothers, with their perfect jobs, perfect husbands and marriages, whose permanent glow of self-satisfaction is intended to make all the women who don’t conform to that image – because they are poorer or black or their lives are just more humanly complicated – feel like total failures.3 This has the added advantage of letting a government whose ...”