“... don’t keep a diary at all, I wouldn’t know what for; nothing happens to me to stir my inmost self. This applies even if I weep, as I did yesterday in a cinematographic theatre in Verona. I am capable of enjoying human relationships, but not of experiencing them.’ Again, the note cannot be sent until it has been reclassified as a found object. Its ...”

“... affairs, then separation and divorce; the miseries and raptures of the newly discovered sexual self; difficulties with alienated, confused children; the illness, decline and death of one parent, then the other; the inevitable regrets and sorrows. These are some of the familiar threads of Munro’s fiction. She has never ceased to be enthralled by her own ...”

“... go on a journey’. This contemporary description indirectly acknowledges Turpin’s status as a self-defined gentleman (his father was a butcher), for gentlemen took horse, while the poor walked. For weeks, Turpin had been ‘eating, drinking and carousing’, ‘joking, drinking and telling stories’ with an unending stream of visitors to the York ...”

“... it looked out from her steady eyes.’ Whether it was a living soul or a ‘radiant sovereign self’ (Margaret Fuller’s version of Wollstonecraft) that women saw in the author of The Rights of Woman, what the heroic image replaced – the woman one could not bear to be, generally one’s mother – was as important as the fantasy of liberated womanhood ...”

“... calls – that Guernica proved Picasso had lost his stuff, for instance – might seem wrong; his self-assurance might verge on narrow-mindedness; the game might bore us. But the rulings were clear: by 1954, Jackson Pollock’s paintings were ‘forced’ and ‘dressed up’; Clyfford Still never left the minor league; Marcel Duchamp was a joker (not in a ...”

“... kindly country gent, made him the perfect figurehead for the new propriety. That George was also a self-satisfied buffoon made him a delight for satirists. Barrell gives a wonderfully funny account of royal holidays spent in Weymouth, where one of the king’s favourite recreations was riding out to meet the locals. The book’s cover illustration is a Gillray ...”

“... his own disillusioned generation, he seemed perpetually crosser than most. Towering, handsome, self-assured (‘Everyone always seems to have known me’), this Hungarian emigrant was quite unlike the pallid, fish-eyed Professor Otto Silenus, Evelyn Waugh’s caricature Modernist. Silenus had come to the Home Counties spouting aphorisms from the Bauhaus ...”

“... of Richard and Richmond fighting, and I gilded it after which I cut it out with no white.’ This self-assured mixture of literature and art prefigures the preoccupations of Gabriel’s life. It is a medievalist text that draws his attention, and he responds first by acting parts of it out with his siblings and then by constructing a picture. In his early ...”

“... opening sequence of Un Chien andalou. The mutilation of symbol, value, history and even of self was crucial to the Modernist urge. The moderns wanted to be new, fast. This urgency demanded that the old be eliminated. ‘I am dynamite,’ Nietzsche bellowed. Echoing this, the French incendiary Louis Aragon remarked that he could think of nothing more ...”

“... into cowardice, and at an inconceivable price. This, as much as anything else, accounts for his self-loathing, and the masochistic pleasure he seems to take in it. He is a shameless voyeur who hasn’t a shred of respect for Genevieve; a lecher who fantasises about his sister and the 16-year-old daughter of the owner of the Persian restaurant where he works ...”

“... era who directly challenged white privilege by supporting equal citizenship rights and colonial self-determination. All were, as the historian of anthropology George Stocking put it, ‘evolutionists’: that is, they assimilated ‘races’ to ‘stages’ of the human evolutionary past, and then assumed each had to develop separately and at its own ...”

“... he was going to go and be a hermit for a while: ‘Are you looking for God or looking for your self? she said. Can you even tell the difference any more? … Six years, she said, it’s been six years, and you leave now, at the worst time there could be, and for nothing … You are a child, she said, you always have been, and now I have two ...”

“... crush it. The Daily Mail ethos – strident, certain, mono-minded – smacks of the bully’s self-disgust. It is not a joyous newspaper, or a happy one, and Dacre’s worst effect has been to let it seem mired in the things it hates, as if society’s worst excesses were mostly an outgrowth of its own paranoid imagination. As with most warriors for ...”

“... school of belief in benevolent empire, among them Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, with their self-serving fairy tales about a post-Vietnam US internationalism organised around ‘complexity’, ‘interdependence’, ‘regime theory’ and ‘liberal institutionalism’. But his main focus is Gramsci, who as general secretary of the PCI was interned by ...”

“... One​ of many remarkable aspects of Egypt’s 2011 revolt was its intense self-consciousness. It wasn’t just that the sit-ins were being broadcast 24 hours a day on satellite TV, with huge screens mounted in Tahrir Square so that the crowd could watch itself writhing in pixels, like the mosh pit in a nightclub ...”