“... from a boy – it is easier for the viewer to share their space. You feel that they would be too self-absorbed to notice you. Christen Købke’s ‘Portrait of the Landscape Painter Frederik Sødring’ (1832) There are pictures in which rooms are something more than backdrops. In Danloux’s Baron de Besenval in His Salon de Compagnie, the ...”

“... hold on his membership. Cyanide pills – every guerrilla carried them – were an inducement to self-destruction. The current government continues to use the Prevention of Terrorism Act to repress Tamil civil rights; the army is still a constant presence in Tamil regions; press freedom continues to be threatened. In January, President Rajapaksa sacked the ...”

“... for modernity through their stark receding repetitions. Alternately, there are his melancholy, self-referential pasts: the old street clowns whom no one still cares to watch, or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, forlorn spirit and squat flesh, adrift in a Parisian’s fantasy of desert Spain. ‘A Third-Class Carriage’ (c.1865) That this exhibition is ...”

“... represent himself as someone who could make things happen. His tone more often hovered between self-deprecatory (‘can’t seem to do any better at the moment’) and doleful (‘do you really mean you would slog up here to have lunch with me’). Although Concerning E.M. Forster was published earlier this year and he’d been working on it for some ...”

“... responses to dress and being dressed? Are the installations and definitions here hybrid routes to self-knowledge? When Phillips has it that ‘the words and the objects in the exhibition exhibit each other, show each other off,’ he seems also to be saying that the objects and definitions will educate us, not in facts, but in attending to the experience of ...”

“... to the United Nations, former director of Harvard’s Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and self-described ‘genocide chick’, who advocated war in Libya and Syria, and argued for new ways to arm-twist US allies into providing more troops for Obama’s escalated but unsuccessful war in Afghanistan. This last argument wasn’t successful in ...”

“... word on judicial tenure be in the hands of politicians? There is no prescribed procedure, and no self-evident format, for trying a judge at the bar of either House. The only judge ever to have been dismissed on parliamentary motion was an Admiralty judge, Sir Jonah Barrington, who in 1830 was found guilty of misappropriating litigants’ funds. The case ...”

“... British people, since there is no way of stopping a thunderstorm. This … is a secret source of self-lacerating joy among the citizenry. The British rather enjoy feeling helpless, as the Americans do not. The thought that there is absolutely nothing one can do is regarded by some in the United States as defeatist, nihilistic and in some obscure sense ...”

“... movie contracts, as David Reynolds has shown in his riveting In Command of History. Then there is self-justification after retirement, which almost always produces memoirs of numbing boredom: I assume – or hope – that no one alive has actually read every page of all the volumes published under Attlee’s, Eden’s and Macmillan’s names. (Eden partly ...”

“... officer; the officer has been charged with ‘premeditated manslaughter’, but claims he acted in self-defence. The week that followed saw mass demonstrations culminating in a general strike, the occupation of universities throughout the country, the torching of public buildings, the firebombing of police stations and the destruction and pillaging of hundreds ...”

“... book went to press too long ago for Obama to get a mention; Jeb Bush’s absurd claim to be a ‘self-made man’ – ‘few batted an eye at that description’ – is set up to be knocked down, however. In the second half of Outliers, Gladwell makes some bolder and not always so persuasive claims about broader ethnic contexts: Korean pilots are more likely ...”

“... that a real person?’ – absurd, it doesn’t go away. You examine the huge face of the Mueck self-portrait that was on show in the British Museum at the beginning of this year as you would your own in a magnifying mirror. You may be disgusted by the enlargement as Gulliver was by the huge girls of Brobdingnag: ‘their skins appeared so coarse and ...”

“... the mood of supposed distaste is really part of the city’s offbeat attraction, its infectious, self-regarding faith that there is no place like it. In Antonioni’s view – or in our view of his view as it appears after fifty years – that London was not so much swinging as dangling and scampering, not sure what it wanted but desperately sure of wanting ...”

“... reminder that one collector’s treasure is another’s trash, that a deadpan readymade may trump self-conscious ...”

“... dramatic and genuinely sacrificial: ‘The composition of his … artwork had imposed upon him a self-destructive lifestyle.’ Not compensation then (‘Life is short but art is long’) but up-front, unguaranteed payment: Art is long (maybe) only if you make your life ...”