“... of infidels and Jews and determined to conquer the West, a civilisation gone soft, weakened by self-doubt, political correctness bordering on treason, and, worst of all, a ‘culture of denial’. Gilbert spells it out: In the 1930s, the danger of Nazism was there . . . but people thought, well, this is a German problem, it’s a limited problem ...”

“... of Rothko’s statements is now, and probably always was, an act of faith that requires a sort of self-hypnosis. ‘Red on Maroon’ (1959), section four of the Seagram mural. The series that dominates the exhibition, the Seagram murals, arose from a commission for paintings to line the walls of a private dining-room in the Four Seasons restaurant in ...”

“... Secret Agent (1974) for initiating the project, shortly after Orwell’s death in 1950. The self-aggrandising Hunt may have exaggerated his own importance in the operation – possibly inventing the juicy detail that Orwell’s widow, Sonia, was wooed with the promise of meeting her favourite star, Clark Gable – but, as detailed by Daniel Leab in ...”

“... Howard, racist football fans, the Mail) and several preening anecdotes, dressed up as self-deprecation. He once went to the help of a man who’d been mugged on Hampstead Heath. When the man realised who the good bloke who’d saved him was, he said: ‘You’re Alastair Campbell? I fucking hate you.’ In Waco, Texas, Campbell met in the hotel ...”

“... I did sit long enough among the jumpy pixellated images to feel, for a while, that there was a self-denying lesson implied – something along the lines that all art is a distraction from proper ...”

“... really the issue, is it? The issue is that the belief has gone – the sense of freedom, and of self-transportation – but at least cabin crews make less fuss about the information on the safety card, to say nothing of the helpful whistle that one can blow to attract ...”

“... it has taken over the slightly older Passmore Edwards Library next door. Passmore Edwards, a self-educated social reformer and newspaper proprietor, provided money for the gallery – he had funded other, similar buildings. He wanted his name on this one. Henrietta Barnett, the driving force behind the project, objected and what would, it seems, have ...”

“... under the footage of Boyle’s triumph. YouTube, you could say, is the depot for international self-realisation. Danny MacAskill, a young guy in Edinburgh who can do brilliant tricks on his mountain bike, gets himself filmed and somebody sticks it up on YouTube. Three million views. The young guy’s a legend. Andy McKee, a man who picks and slaps his ...”

“... runs until 5 April at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. It is a cautious, self-regarding show about lives led in the Legion and famous legionnaires. As you’d expect, grizzled ex-Nazis flushing out the Viet Minh along the Red River Delta are downplayed. The Legion’s stars include the poet Blaise Cendrars, who joined in 1914, and the ...”

“... of what went wrong was blunt: ‘Civil servants are by their nature cautious. There is collective self-discipline and people wanting an easy life and becoming morally and intellectually lazy, so they just do what the minister wants.’ Now, of course, that minister is Boris Johnson, a man who has written of the ‘watermelon smiles’ of Congolese ‘tribal ...”

“... drew attention to it on his website and it was removed, has been borrowed back. There is something self-congratulatory in this demonstration that the museum can take a joke, like a headmaster at the end of term indulging high spirits as long as they don’t go too far. Now, when the age of Dissent has become the age of Taking Offence, there are limits. The ...”

“... 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 ...”