“... to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression’. Exasperated and increasingly poor, he puts aside his current project, a novel based on Barthes’s S/Z, and writes a pseudonymous parody of a recent hit, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. He initially calls the book My Pafology and later renames it ...”

“... its maximum gestural impact.When he slipped away from England and his first wife in 1898, for a self-appointed exile in Dieppe, Paris and Venice, Sickert left behind a reputation as foremost apostle to the ‘genius’, he whose ‘lightest utterance is inspired’, the ‘immortal’, London’s ‘living Old Master’. Whistler was his first point of ...”

“... 50 million population of the United Kingdom. This seems to me to be a case where our principle of self-determination ought to take second place behind the principle that in a democratic society the minority have to bow to the majority. But the islanders weren’t having any of this; and so successive British governments, clearly frightened of the public (or ...”

“... ruthless, underhanded son of a bitch’. With Barnes, there was no middle ground, minuscule self-doubt and no remorse over those he belittled, slandered and discarded; you were either in or, forever, out. As is often the case with those described as ‘complex’, Barnes had only two gears: forward or reverse, nice or nasty, the latter mode suddenly ...”

“... by Rembrandt or Goya or Manet or Degas, you can trace their changing intentions. For instance, a self-portrait made by Degas when he was 23 began as a light etch, with fine, spaced-out cross-hatching. Later, it became richer – the lines dense and black – yet remained a faint idea of a self: the hands unfinished, the ...”

“... sophisticated, eventually becoming more real than the man. Like all writers, Rushdie had a shadow self, and had to deal with people confusing him with his creations, but the shadow remained a function of the self. The fatwa severed the shadow from the man. It travelled all over the world, terrorised people and entrenched ...”

“... Drank some ’48 claret alone.’ At the same time, like many sybarites, he was drenched in self-pity, deploring the emptiness of a life of pleasure and, looking back, saw his existence as a dark tunnel. Simplicity of life was the only answer, but one not adopted at Mentmore, where, as that waspish paedophile Loulou Harcourt claimed, ‘truffles seem to ...”

“... natural superiority … was modelled on the heroes of John Buchan: decent, anti-intellectual, self-deprecating and eternally stiff of upper lip’. Sometimes, the officer in Russia actually was one of Buchan’s or Rudyard Kipling’s heroes: Brigadier-General Ironside, earlier encountered by Buchan in Africa after the Second Boer War, served as ...”

“... about Pompey and Caesar.’ It’s easy to forget, because we know what happened next, but also self-evidently true, as we know from our own experience: however horrifying the political catastrophe unfolding around us, we still devote ourselves primarily to the interpersonal and institutional jostling of our own little lives. So it was at Rome, and in those ...”

“... it was nicknamed the ‘lunch-hour abortion’. Women’s liberation activists running their own self-help clinic began studying Karman’s method. One member, Lorraine Rothman, noticed a dangerous oversight: there was no valve to stop air passing into the uterus. Using easily acquired materials – aquarium tubing, a Mason jar – Rothman made a menstrual ...”

“... have your last view of the nation, The river of a darkening capital And its diamond clusters of self-love. You could write now of good misdirected And innocence betrayed, but the deadline has come, Only the foghorns wail like creatures from Prehistory: Speak to us, who cannot see Where we are going or know what is ...”

“... up on the sofa, feet criss-crossed with tan lines from her sandals (the day sleeper in an act of self-care). What was once plainly political has become familial, casual, intimate, or all of those together, and then back round to political again. When I look at Lange’s daughter-in-law sleeping, I remember that the US is the only OECD country where women ...”

“... you ever kill a fish. I was once but now I am human. I have imagination. I want to love. I have self-interest. Things are not me. Do you have another question. I am haunted but by what? Human supremacy? The work of humiliation. The pungency of the pesticide. What else? The hammer that comes down on the head. Knocks the eyes out. I was very ...”

“... Edgar Middleton, who called his autobiography I Might Have Been a Success. She also produced self-portraits in which the camera looks like a metallic face. In 1968, she pictured herself in perky miniature, beside a massive studio camera. She is shackled to the great beast by a cable, which could also be a ...”