“... 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 ...”

“... part of the war on terror. The US elevation of Zarqawi to the front rank of al-Qaida leaders was self-fulfilling. To many Iraqis and Muslims wanting to fight the US, he became a symbol of resistance. His notoriety made it easy for him to raise money. In December 2004, Osama bin Laden declared that he was head of al-Qaida in Iraq. ‘The Islamists often seem ...”

“... that ‘blacks were unfit for democracy, somehow too childlike or too unready or too incapable of self-governing.’ Bumiller doesn’t doubt the sincerity of these reflections on the road from Birmingham to Baghdad: ‘Rice spoke with such intensity and fervour that if she was exploiting history and her own life to make a dubious political point . . . it ...”

“... perfectly articulated group, lit with a strong sense of theatre – the saint has something of the self-consciousness of a player in a crime scene re-enactment. Batoni priced these pictures himself, and some were still on his hands when he died, the major assets of an estate that, reduced by his handsome style of living, could not meet the bequests made in his ...”

“... by Chekhov. As might Power’s pupil, Natasha, a teenage version of her namesake in Three Sisters. Self-absorption is the girl’s shield. When her driver, seeing corpses on the road ahead, abruptly changes course on the way to the theatre (I wish Power told us what they were going to see), Natasha does not stop powdering: ‘It is only thieves … is my nose ...”