“... winds leaves birds systems directions visibles invisibles honeysuckle limbs and rose gaining self-song, motion, entering this continuum – oh continuum do not lie to me with this delicate weight of time, this floating of as ifs and further-ons and all your guides to dreaming, abundance, the coming true of the true. No. From under here, listening ...”

“... is split into four sections representing the different possibilities stipulated in the letter. The self-portraits are hung with texts in the glass cases below corresponding to the faces above. Man Ray sent two texts, ‘L’Inquiétude’ and the unintelligible ‘Simultaneous Dialogue’. One of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s wooden constructions is included; in the ...”

“... I was transported back to my godmother’s kitchen thirty years ago. Like Elsie, she was a self-sufficient woman who lived alone in a small terraced house in Cambridge. The David Parr House is full of familiar signs of quiet industriousness. Elsie’s yellow floral housecoat hangs on the kitchen wall next to her string shopping bag and a large ...”

“... not only between humans but of every being on earth.’ Hildegard’s concept of a world in which self emerges through plants provides a prototype for this. In a reversal of gender stereotypes, she figures the Virgin Mary as ‘the greenest branch’, a symbol of virility and wisdom, while Jesus is the flower. This vision shares much with Yggdrasil, the ...”

“... but she was immune to the world’s opinion or, at least, unwilling to expose herself to it. Self-sufficiency has its limits, however. Rodin’s praise of her work (she was his mistress and model) was important. And even she needed a little money. The American collector John Quinn would, right up to his death in 1924, buy anything she would sell. For the ...”

“... but then it is sinister. There are few truly handsome people in Dürer’s work if you except his self-portraits, and that long-ringleted Christ-like face is not to everyone’s taste. The odd slinky nymph has a centrefold lubricity, but not even the female saints or the Virgin herself have winning faces. This was not for want of thinking about beauty. Much ...”

“... changed much, but Louis has, as we learn from his first monologue in this time and place. He is a self-absorbed maniac and would-be serial killer, convinced that his failure to have had any sort of relation with a girl or a woman is a fault of that sex and needs to be avenged. He picks Gabrielle as his target, the woman who will pay for the perceived crimes ...”

“... up and dispersed in space. Yet 6, from 2017-18, is a lattice of canals or rivers that has become self-involved and confused, its meanders orphaned into oxbow lakes. As the drawings scaled up, a storm of text arrived. Look closely at the scalpelled borders where the works have been taken apart and put back together. They bristle on either side with ...”

“... utopianism of the original work, not least because most visitors to the current exhibition are too self-conscious to participate.Nicola L. first visited New York in 1966. In the late 1970s, she moved there permanently and began making films. Doors Ajar (2013), her final film, was set in her rooms at the Chelsea Hotel, where she lived for thirty years. In the ...”

“... sits composedly, if not exactly decorously (there is, in her look, a suggestion of the cheerful, self-willed schoolgirl) in front of a background of dark foliage dotted with pinks, columbines and butterflies. There are preparatory drawings for scenes of romantic chivalry: one of the now sadly battered frescos in the series illustrating Arthurian legends ...”

“... recourse throughout the letters to earlier usages, which are also reflections on an earlier self.His writing to Hale coincided with his acquiring a room in Russell Square – ‘and I need not see secretaries or visitors unless I want to.’ A year later he was prompted to recall wrathfully how long it had taken to reach this small ledge of ...”

“... enough, in 1979, he had bought the Ritz Hotel in Paris. But the Ritz was a bauble, an unprofitable self-indulgence. Certainly al-Fayed was reckoned to be small-time by global tycoons like Tiny Rowland, who, when he met al-Fayed, had been refused permission to acquire Harrods by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Hoping to have this decision rescinded at ...”

“... as a target – was this terrorism? If the West’s answer is that this was not terrorism, it was self-defence – then we must think to adopt this definition too.’ This was said to me by a leading Islamist in Beirut a few days ago. He was making a point, but behind his rhetorical question plainly lies the deeper issue of what the Gaza violence will signify ...”

“... command. The marks of fear were all there, but fear as a gift, as a rare, ironic skin around the self, the unprotected soul was now ready to speak the bitter truth. None of us had ever heard anything like it. I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be the month of April or of May. For the year is still young, a ...”

“... resist it. The party’s last real leader, Enrico Berlinguer, personified austere contempt for the self-indulgence and infantilism of the new universe of cultural and material consumption. After he had gone, the step from unbending refusal to gushing capitulation was a short one – Walter Veltroni coming to resemble a beaming picture-card out of the ...”