“... to see what all the fuss was about, whether it was something they could be part of sans affront to self-esteem. And those temple hyenas who had seen enough, nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze, were no place you could count on having taken a proverbial powder as rifle butts received another notch. I, meanwhile ... I was going to say I had squandered ...”

“... activities meant a quiz night in the pub or a quiz show on the television. Englishness means self-centredness and unsociability. They would do a crossword rather than engage in a conversation with someone. It is not the weather which has made me feel cold in the Englishman’s country after ten years, but the indifference shown by its citizens. I am ...”

“... choose and not to care is to conform by default – which is the most insidious choice of all, and self-defeating.The look of a giraffe or macaw is evidence of breeding success in the generations of ancestors through which the species wandered to achieve drabness or splendour. Although our fashions evolve year by year, rather than over millennia – and are an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gestures of the figures round the crucified Christ make all the religious art which followed seem self-conscious and knowing. No wonder our moment does not allow directness of that kind. At the Saatchi Gallery, Boris Mikhailov’s photographs of the Russian homeless are shocking, as people on our own streets are, and shocking in a more straightforward way ...”

“... should be no barrier to loving and coupling. The Church of Me is just one example of Spencer’s self-absorption. It protected him from ‘the tame formalistic orthodoxy which was Roger Fry’s enduring legacy to British art’ (Hyman’s comment on Fry’s dismissal of Spencer). It also made him uninterested in the physical qualities of painted canvas. His ...”

“... undoubtedly the greater sceptic. He sees 007 as part of a narcissistic repair job on Britain’s self-regard, which took such a pounding after 1945. Bond, as Winder understands (and loves) him, eased a generation of British readers into the realities of the postwar world – he calls this a long moment of ‘decompression’ – by offering a parallel ...”

“... with the patient under a general anaesthetic. She lies, eyes shut, mouth half open, apparently self-absorbed. The same expression is worn by women in Japanese erotic prints, or in those which show them being attacked by succubi. The illustration is placed elegantly within a circle, the blood, of which the artist has not hesitated to make a pattern, flows ...”

“... had tormented the shy, lovesick painter in his youth sits enthroned in a flashy drawing-room, a self-satisfied, puffy-looking old trout, holding her horrid little dog in her arms.’ This sort of picture, he writes, is ‘“bad painting” before its time’. But the bad paintings are not bad enough for that. There is no sign that Vuillard’s tongue is in ...”

“... The body, like the line that draws it, is thinned, spluttering, vulnerable. It looks like the self-portrait Hokusai drew in old age, which Baselitz knew of and admired. ‘Until the age of seventy,’ Hokusai said, ‘nothing that I drew was worthy of notice.’ The sense that Eroi d’Oro is a memorial exhibition is heightened by the eerie presence of ...”

“... in disguise and no intention to seduce, just the metal shimmering and falling, in consummate self-expression, as deity and dogma. Islamic approaches – there are quite a few – are much closer to Nonconformist and Anglican traditions, where the divinity stands to the side of money, reminding the faithful that he is one thing and mammon ...”

“... government in Pristina were unhappy about the Kosovo Serbs casting votes in local elections under self-supervision, and strongly opposed to their voting in a Serbian general election. There were plenty of Nato troops in town, but everything went off quietly. A Serb in his sixties, a little drunk, approached the huddle of reporters outside the polling station ...”

“... companionably slipped his arm through mine: ‘pleased’ seems feeble, ‘proud’ seems absurdly self-important. Perhaps simply ‘moved’? Whatever it was it proved too strong for me quite to cope with, because after delivering him back at his flat I found that, even before I got home, I had started to cry. Karl Miller writes: A few weeks ago I visited ...”

“... and failures, Jenkins carried the burden of embodying the centre-left’s idea of its best self, the emblem for all those hopes that politics might be a bit more rational and enlightened and, well, agreeable than it actually is. He appeared to meet several of the job specifications for the role of social-democratic philosopher-king. And his own ...”

“... choice, an oral biography can strike the reader as an authentic reproduction of voice, in all its self-contradictory rhythm and curl – or borderline racist, like some Victorian anthropologist’s respectably freaky show and tell. A couple of things should be made clear: one, Quincy Troupe is a black poet and academic, not some ofay ...”