“... individualist Brexitists, think that history is the outcome of the efforts of heroic individuals (self-made men like them, free thinkers, the ‘legendary’ Boris), or, if more alt-right fascist than alt-right libertarian, the struggle between races. The collapse of this modern political epistemology and the collective ...”

“... bars of soap. A directive and an assignment. The reading, stuck between tawdry and kooky, pulp and self-help. ‘Ramon George’ and ‘Right Guard’. ‘Deodorant’ – that must mean God-given – and ‘Sneyd’ – if not the mis-written ‘Sneya’ that bedevils the fellow’s hapless Canadian passport. The weird, badly wearing (not so much ‘quite ...”

“... it is an instant trigger of distant infancy. I am sharply returned to the 1950s, to my child self. I am once again, for a fugitive moment, a New Elizabethan. This hue, which works on the colour receptor in my brain, is impervious to simulation. It is unknown both to Pantone (though it isn’t that far from 18-4537) and to the British Colour Council’s ...”

“... this was hell,’ Jack says of his life, ‘no flames at all, just an eternity of disheartened self-awareness.’ He is a ‘naked man’ who also calls himself ‘the Prince of Darkness’; he may be spiritually dead, or spiritually not yet born; he is Adam in a world that has ended, instead of a world that is yet to begin. Jack is happy to describe his ...”

“... scroungers who made piles of cash out of trivial or imaginary injuries, whingers who turned their self-regarding grievances into human rights claims, and legislators and lawyers who enabled and encouraged them to do it. These have become our folk-devils.Enter, ex machina, the Secret Barrister (hereafter ‘SB’ and assumed for grammatical and syntactical ...”

“... According to Fénéon, Degas painted his nudes crouching in tubs as if their bodies were self-generated. Often posed with their backs towards us and sometimes cropped by the frame, these women also ‘externalise the viewer’, which heightens our sense of autonomy. (Michael Fried would call this ‘absorption’, while Freud might see it as ...”

“... often featured her young sons, Hans and Peter, in her pictures of proletarian families. Searching self-portraits – Kollwitz produced more than a hundred in all media – also punctuate her oeuvre, which is meticulously surveyed in the current retrospective at MoMA (until 20 July). Largely self-taught as a ...”

“... world and this gives him an appealing sheen of defiance. Leaving the community for stints of self-exploration seems to be reserved for men. The third-person narration remains tethered to Ruth, who looks aslant at the daily happenings on the Dorf: two sisters ladle mulled wine from a stockpot ‘in syncopation’; a class of children unearth an ...”

“... alone cannot account for his eminence, however. Crumb is both an observant satirist and a self-aware student of his own drives. His grasp of American vernacular and his sardonic humour suggest a comparison with Mark Twain as well as with Twain’s admirer, the proudly prejudiced social critic H.L. Mencken. Rambunctious and often offensive, Crumb draws ...”

“... job’ at all, let alone have to add ‘money’, as if ‘economic’ was unclear. Note, too, the self-pity (‘staff hurts’ and ‘hard ones’) and concomitant self-glorification: para 4 is supposed to have ‘you’ as the subject but by 4(c) this has irresistibly been turned around. Nixon, it seems, felt good telling ...”

“... philosophers typically do in the absence of a command of the facts: I can ask what such a self-understanding might look like, and I can do that in the guise of asking myself what I would mean if I claimed that there is a history of the human being to which we are blinded by the traditional histories of flashing, dramatic events.’ Cavell’s concern ...”

“... has the dreamlike quality of introspective monologue – a genre which is hardly ever free from self-absorption and self-indulgence. But he has always been on the move, and in the literary sense too. At the beginning of his career as a writer he was associated with the famous ‘Gruppe 47’ to which German literature ...”

“... officials regarded Morgenthau as a barbarian and believed that a policy of revenge would be self-defeating as well as nauseating. Even Americans such as Jackson – Bradley Smith notes – recognised that public opinion in a democracy can change with astonishing speed. The very people who demanded that the pips should squeak would be among the first to ...”

“... an aging prodigy, the Mozart of celluloid, putting himself and his troupe through the hoops with self-conscious bravado. He irradiated the entire project with a glancing mockery that might have reminded a bookish provincial lad of Don Juan or the Dunciad, but of nothing he had previously encountered, or expected, in the cinema. At least where I lived, these ...”

“... and political lapses, and sometimes drew an angry protest from his victims; the formality and self-evident marginality of verse allowed him to enjoy the role of irritant. But it was not until he settled in London in 1889, and assimilated the rhythms and the fatalistic bravado of music-hall songs, that he began writing poems which claim to represent, to ...”