“... however, is remarkable for a style which arches brilliantly between sociological observation and self-delighting irony. This introductory paragraph is emblematic of her technique: Getting a buzz off the stones of Bath, occupying a conspicuous site not fifty yards from the mysterious, chthonic aperture from which the hot springs bubble out of the inner ...”

“... and of post Christian humanism is to place at the centre of the imagined universe the thinking and self-conscious animal, this little creature with his Renaissance strut and hard shell of intellectual pride, which shuts him off from immediate responses to the natural order. We need in our imagination to travel far back in time and to reconstruct images of the ...”

“... 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 ...”