“... particular machines; not the exhaustion of a civilisation addicted to petroleum, but its oblivious ...”

“... the whole Vatileaks saga, is that the Vatican is seething with conspiracy, faction, infighting, self-interest, venality and back-stabbing. (When do they find time to pray?) The counteraccusations haven’t been slow in coming, including strong hints that the leaks are part of an orchestrated campaign against Bertone. The National Catholic Reporter said of a ...”

“... film is a violence that is not only brutal and remorseless, but unnecessary, a sort of despotic self-indulgence. We could also read it more optimistically, as an expression not of strength but of panic, a sign that in Russia in 1905 as in many other places at later and still current times, authorities dreamed of force not as a pragmatic instrument of ...”

“... filth disgusting and cleanliness desirable, is not a comfortable exhibition. The desire to keep self and environment proper goes deep. In the book of the exhibition one reads that primates spend up to 20 per cent of their time at the mutual grooming that creates social bonds, controls parasites and straightens tangles.* Birds preen, cats and dogs lick ...”

“... open a bank account and 3.6 million are inadequately housed or homeless. Depardieu has chosen self-exclusion and he’s endlessly, tiresomely visible. Social exclusion in France is less of a ...”

“... without even asking what’s to be forgiven. In this moral wilderness the policeman seems as self-indulgent and arbitrary as anyone else. Like the gangsters in Drive he likes the cleaning up more than the cleanliness. I’m not going to describe the way he pins an opponent’s arms and legs to his chair with kebab skewers, or the piercing of eyes which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... their mutual distance collapses on the canvas. Bowling’s identity as an émigré, and his self-image as a young artist at a moment of transition, are dramatised in Mirror (1964-66). Exhibited alongside it at Tate Britain are the black and white photographs on which it was based, a disarming counterpoint. They show the spiralling ironwork staircase at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... uranium fuel for those reactors will initially come from Russia, but Iran says it wishes to be self-reliant for its supply of fuel. Since 1985, Iran has been developing its own enrichment capability, importing centrifuge designs and components from Pakistan. Uranium centrifuges have a dual purpose: they can produce low-enriched (2 to 3 per cent) uranium ...”

“... its earliest past. The deadening effect of the jargon in which the heretical doctrine of ‘self-management’ is often formulated by aging exponents of a former orthodoxy is not wholly eradicated by the considerable success of the policy in practice. Yugoslavia’s finest writer, the former Party hard-liner Milovan Djilas, though free to attend and ...”

“... poor, for whom poor relief had to be organised on a national scale. This state of affairs was self-perpetuating. Without education it was virtually impossible to move upwards socially, but the poor could not afford to educate their children. It is therefore misleading to speak of ‘the indifference to formal schooling found in many sectors of the ...”

“... intention when he was practising Abstract Expressionism: he said he had in mind the late self-portraits of Rembrandt and hoped that a face might one day emerge from the brushstrokes. The day never came. Perhaps when handling the brush he should have held a photograph in his other hand. I’m sure Bacon wouldn’t like the word, but I don’t think it ...”

“... 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 ...”