“... of Western governments to rely on diaspora personalities to endorse their own wishful thinking and self-regarding readings of reality in the region, and as a source of personnel to be parachuted into power – or at least office – in each and every regime change effected by Western military muscle. In an advertisement broadcast recently in Pakistan, where ...”

“... silvery-tongued back-ups to whatever life-muddle he happened to be engaged with’. Yet Ford’s self-exculpatory fantasies animate the sequence in a wonderfully mad way. ‘I stand for monogamy and chastity,’ Christopher Tietjens says, setting himself against the times as well as his devil-wife, Sylvia. The books are suffused with a seriously meant – if ...”

“... to metaphors in capital letters (A PROBLEM IS A BODY OF WATER, THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE SELF, THEORIES ARE CLOTH, THE CHANGEABILITY OF A BELIEF IS THE RESILIENCE OF THE OBJECT) is a legacy of the work of George Lakoff, the originator and still the high priest of metaphor studies, who emerged from MIT in the 1960s as a student and antagonist of Noam ...”

“... a man who died, and in him died The large-eyed boy, then the teen peacock In the unremarked placid self-devouring That makes up being alive. But all at once Those natural overlaps got cut, then shuffled Tight in a block, their layers patted square. v It’s late. And it always will be late. Your small monument’s atop its hillock Set with pennants that ...”

“... to him all but three are to be seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until 3 December. (The self-portrait in the Uffizi is his only large painting on canvas.) Even this near complete showing of his surviving work puts no strain on the capacity of the long narrow space in which Dulwich hangs loan exhibitions. Not a lot is known about him. He had friends ...”

“... in the Territories,’ he says. ‘In this tough situation, you can’t distinguish between self-defence, active defence and very active defence.’ The role of private security has been raised in the Knesset, but few Israelis share Oron’s worries, and the press remains largely uncritical of Government policy on the Intifada, let alone of the role ...”

“... century having resown and retilled the field, have replaced the coherent, low-rise, spire-dotted, self-explanatory city of the early views with a confusing patchwork, there is enough left for this exhibition to raise ghosts as you walk in Southwark or along ...”

“... embarrassing transgressions. In Klimt’s protégé Egon Schiele this ambivalence disappears. His self-portrait with Klimt of 1912 is the closest thing here to a great picture. The figures, both wearing smocks, stand close together – a blue smock belonging to Klimt can be seen in the exhibition. There is no island of safety isolating the fiercely drawn ...”

“... oozing arm ending in a vast crab claw, and become an outcast. Without ceasing to be the blinkered, self-admiring fellow he always was, he has decided he doesn’t want to be the mere material of his compatriots’ medical and military experiments. One of the finer touches in this (fortunately) none too serious plot is that the aliens have weapons of tremendous ...”

“... economy giants, relies on those who deliver the services being legally classified as self-employed ‘independent contractors’ rather than ‘employees’, and thus not sharing the fundamental rights and job security afforded to other workers. A six-page manual underscores this. It prescribes, and proscribes, certain words: rather than ...”

“... can’t bear to let go. There are several wonderful moments in the film that would count as sheer self-indulgence in any ordinary account of documentary film-making, moments of pure photography, so to speak, where the camera itself is amazed at what it can do, or perhaps at what there is for cameras to see. I am thinking in particular of a scene where a man ...”

“... and tangled bits of history and mythology hang in the air: spectacular but romantic defeat, self-congratulating hatred, the West, integration, much more. The film ends on a flag too: the flag of the United States, upside down, at first in colour, then frozen in black and shades of grey. Before that we have seen a discussion between the aforementioned ...”

“... of justice, and perhaps much else (assuming, that is, anything exists outside of this huge self-involved system). The men who appear in Young’s video seem at best peripheral figures, always subject to the speech and gaze of the judges, or stranded in passageways and vestibules. One fretful advocate looks as though he has been waiting there for ...”

“... become artworks whose qualities as objects take on an autonomous life. An art of protest and self-examination is incorporated into the culture of excess it criticises.One way to respond to these displays is to give them the same status as the masks and effigies displayed in a museum of anthropology. Many of those were made to be discarded – even ...”

“... pose (and which, in debased form, had a long history as photographers’ studio backdrops). The Self-Portrait done just before his move to Bath – a significant step up the social ladder – makes the subjects of earlier pictures (the Gravenor family of Ipswich, for example) look the provincials they were.† The change of mood, a new suavity and ...”