“... consumers at home. He also wrote ‘Vanity’, and the painting does suggest not only a murderous self-absorption but a collective vanitas, a reminder of death – literal abroad, moral Stateside. It is enough to remind you of the ...”

“... registered quickly by the eye can be long in the making. Mueck’s pieces, Dead Dad and his giant self-portrait mask at the Saatchi, as well as the smaller, but still huge pregnant woman, the under life-size Mother and Child (with umbilically attached baby), the little man in a big rowing-boat and the life-size swaddled baby in a real blanket, all now to be ...”

“... a company which specialised in painting cinema posters to produce pictures including a number of self-portraits and ‘completely clichéd images culled from existing sources (including a hardcore pornographic picture of a couple mutually masturbating)’. That picture is in the exhibition. Only in Peter Doig’s dreamlike pictures of canoes on lakes, snow ...”

“... like architecture for architecture’s sake. But they have practical justifications: this isn’t self-indulgence. For example, the height, which seems disproportionate to the floor area, provides the large enclosed volume necessary for the proper control of air temperature: small greenhouses overheat very quickly. One problem with the 1981 building, apart ...”

“... a milestone in the history of reportage came to nothing. He also made a series of photographic self-portraits which he hoped to publish as a companion to his fourth volume of autobiography. Some of these survive: images of the writer at his desk, with his children, playing the guitar. (They have captions like ‘Come on you old hack, let’s fight,’ and ...”

“... side two). But the sense of time slipping away is perhaps best expressed – with anger, despair, self-deflating bathos – in the refrain of ‘Girl Loves Me’: ‘Where the fuck did Monday ...”

“... Ghost).Berlin and bildungsroman, you say. OK, so he’s a camera: get on with it. But, self-plagiarism apart, I think that Mailer is distilling an important knowledge from his many earlier reflections on violence and perversity and low life. As Balzac knew, and as Dix Butler boasts, the criminal and sexual outlaw world may be anarchic, but it is ...”

“... series of mere technicalities: if, in other words, the history is not to be trivialised. Given the self-protective limits of our capacity to understand a phenomenon such as the attempted annihilation of whole peoples – a capacity which our mass media are designed further to impair – some trivialisation is inevitable. And since this is a past which won’t ...”

“... end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about Irving, but attacking Gray causes wrathful indignation among Holocaust dogmatists. I sought to learn from men who became monsters, such as Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka (about whom I wrote in ...”

“... rocks and then the stony strand. The heat was baking and the sea was almost warm. Despite self-admonition he kept his eyes peeled for the passage of those two women, a recent rapid glimpse of whom in a small car being driven by the beauty had set his heart stabbing with undilutable power. Happier he was, though, to want no one and nothing. The rich ...”

“... one might have found in a child’s nursery library from the 1890s. He hovers on the edge of self-mockery without committing to it: I was thinking initially of Achilles sitting in his tent and about whether that was a first example of industrial action … Let me start with that sad day in March 1603, when our beloved sovereign of blessed ...”

“... Being unillusioned was his speciality, and in public he took a nicely self-deprecating line. ‘There are but two important critics in my own country who have troubled to take me seriously,’ he writes in The Summing Up (1938), ‘and when clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering ...”

“... In Tristes Tropiques, his memoir of his fieldwork among the Indians of Brazil, he called the self ‘hateful’. Everything he wrote aimed to puncture the notions of will and agency that cluster around the human subject. The critique of the subject was central to structuralism, the school of thought he helped to found. He existed, he wrote in the ...”

“... leave twenty million dead instantly. Christopher Clark’s breathtakingly good book is, much more self-consciously than Tuchman’s, also a history for its – that is, our – times. An act of terrorism in Sarajevo – the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife – led the Austrian government to make demands on Serbia. If not ...”

“... The Secret Wisdom of the Qabala. The First World War, Fuller argued, had been fought as a war of self-destructive attrition, which brought no benefit to the victors, any more than it did to the losers: it had been a war stuck in the outdated Age of Steam, which must now give way to the incoming Age of Oil, the new epoch of motorisation, the time of the ...”