“... bonnacon is shown expelling faeces, a feat which, the inscription notes, it commonly performs in self-defence.The map’s humanoid creatures are some of its most compelling. There are dog-headed men (seemingly engaged in conversation) as well as a ‘monocule’ or Sciapod: a man with only one foot, extended into the air. He cuts a lonely figure, as does the ...”

“... crazy parties, leopardskin pants and a pony-tail. But now her parents are puzzled. Where is their self-centred daughter? She hasn’t gone to town. Come on. You come down. * The publican wants God as a partner, the businessman, the wife, oh the girl with scars on her wrists taking her baby to God the shiftless drunk no one trusts who lives in a packing shed ...”

“... meditation on artistic susceptibilities. Martin has in part reconstructed a clinical scene: a self-declared mirror-touch synaesthete (here played by the Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca) is asked to watch objects and bodies gently slapped or palpated, and is quizzed on whether or where she feels anything in response. The result is a work that doesn’t ...”

“... general human and animal condition. This is less true of the other work in the show, in which the self-deprecating humour extends to the teasing deprecation of some of his fellow artists and indeed the viewer. One of the ways in which Shrigley offends against the tenets of much contemporary art practice is that he admits to presenting a persona in his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more like Creon – wrote that is for what Hegel calls the daylight gods – the gods of free self-conscious social – social and political – life the gods if you like of middle-class conversation its Fabian certainties its brisk of course that’s often slightly off course like the old Belfast story – that over-troped sea-chestnut of the liner and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”