“... femininity Anna could admire but never emulate. The younger daughter had to learn reserve and self-abnegation, to reconcile herself to the elemental unfairness in a parent’s partiality. Her father even mocked her devotion, writing in 1919 to Max Eitingon in Berlin that Anna had opposed Eitingon’s offer of a gift of 3000 Swedish crowns: ‘my daughter ...”

“... of a priori theories of social evolution or historical diffusion, it later developed into a self-consciously non-historical field of study. The basis for this reversal was the argument that the intimate face-to-face, day-to-day interactions of the individuals living together in a local community which provide the basic subject-matter of social ...”

“... of the country for his pains, returning only after 27 years’ exile and living out his life in self-imposed expiatory silence. It is now nearly impossible, reports Boone, to find copies of his books in libraries: they are removed by traditionalist Mende who feel duty-bound to preserve the secrets of their culture. Reading Our People of the Sierra Leone ...”

“... I tried to find a temporary shorthand for the effect of Upstream Colour. The characters are quiet, self-contained, even self-absorbed; they are consumed by a project they themselves do not understand; and after a while their off-beat world begins to seem like a place any of us could inhabit. Well, inhabit on one of our ...”

“... of their fellow countrymen and ‘influence the course of national policy’. ‘The British self-governing Dominions – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa – feel with us that Britain is geographically and historically a part of Europe, and that they also have their inheritance in Europe,’ Churchill continued. ‘If Europe united is to be ...”

“... malleability of the social formations and new urban subjects they represent; the anxieties of the self-fashioning middle class in the wake of the French Revolution. ‘A Carnival Scene’ (1832) Perhaps the strangest painting in the exhibition is A Carnival Scene, made in 1832, when Boilly was 71. A diverse group of commedia dell’arte characters ...”

“... no choice: if they want to pursue certain types of case they now have to represent themselves. The self-represented take up far more court time. If one side has lawyers and the other doesn’t, the judge may intervene to even things up, but has to be careful not to show undue favour, which would give the other side a justified ground of appeal – and more ...”

“... all fame is a form of obituary. Despite constant entreaties to downsize (from others besides the self-interested Pencillon), he is attached to his marital home: ‘Rooms could be comforting companions, especially if they had been hung and furnished by your wife.’ His only living relatives are his wife’s sister, Katerine (who fills him with ...”

“... The Bon Marché Department Store (1898) is a triumph of the exhibition. In a characteristically self-critical gesture, Vallotton implicates himself: a placard in the central panel advertising ‘Jewellery and Objets d’Art’ addresses the viewer, the consumer of his pictures, inviting us to see ourselves as part of the crowd and his paintings as luxury ...”

“... other hand, the chief characteristic of China as a power in world affairs is its most un-Mongol self-absorption, which exceeds the inherent self-absorption of all very large polities, and of which the most consequential recent example was the post-2009 revival of a territorial claim over the barren rocks known to their ...”

“... Maes’s paintings are hypersensitive to their status as looked-at things, and in their self-consciousness they make looking and watching subjects in themselves. Watchers are everywhere in the genre pictures, observing protagonists going about their tasks or locking eyes with the viewer in ways that can be discomfiting. In Young Woman Sewing ...”

“... as ‘key workers’ – her daughter, for example, who had tested positive for the virus and was self-isolating in Dover.I first visited Thanington early last year as an example of a poor white working-class district in which the majority had voted for Britain to leave the EU. It has a mixture of council and private housing and an estimated population of ...”

“... The furniture is mostly junk: rusted garden chairs, uneven tables, unstuffed sofas, and more self-consciously devised cement benches set with broken tiles, candle-holders fashioned out of milk cartons, that kind of thing. You can get weak Austin beer, or Newcastle Brown Ale, or cappuccinos; nobody will notice if you spend all day there and order ...”

“... of the poem’s creation become so much its theme that there is soon a disastrous lapse into self-consciousness, coy internal reference, sly tomfoolery and baragouin. This may be explicable in a number of ways, apart from by the sheer artificiality of the gimmick. The four poets were, we may assume, deeply versed in the two traditions which they were ...”

“... the ways in which a particular thought form (a ‘consciousness’, as Hegel put it), or again a self-defeating project, can be necessarily involved in or presupposed by a social relationship or other historically-given development. Hegel had one big dark answer to that question; Marxists have lots of active answers, but they tend to scurry off when ...”