“... down; when I stood up I never sat down again.’ Which makes you think about sitting and standing self-portraits: Hogarth sitting – keen, you feel, to get closer to the canvas. Velázquez in Las Meninas standing – clearly needing to move back to see how his latest mark is working. In Freud’s later, freer pictures the puckering of cheek or belly is ...”

“... the swagger one finds in later portraits of the rich, such as those by Reynolds, or the apparent self-confidence so evident in the best portraits of Titian. What we see instead are the members of the local aristocracy wearing their best clothes, but frequently looking slightly stiff and ill at ease. Quite often, too, there is a certain lack of confidence in ...”

“... the business collapsed after a year. Dolls became fetishised and sexualised. Oskar Kokoschka’s Self-Portrait at the Easel features a doll propped up beside the painter. The painter himself appears hunched; his head is oversized and his arm and hand are twisted into an unnatural position: he is the distorted mannequin, bending in unnatural ways. The doll ...”

“... at a picture of, an implied comment on, another Russian cliché: give me a chance of any sort of self-destructive action and I’ll take it. Or more subtly: how can I blame the state when I have so much to blame myself for? The wife says to the lawyer, as they both see the mess they are in: ‘It’s all my fault.’ He doesn’t agree. He ...”

“... version of Chico Marx in the role. The dermatologist came to Murray, he didn’t need to do any self-promoting or seeking of clients, and the dermatologist’s friend (Sofía Vergara), another woman who wants to pay to play around, approaches him too. She’s an even less likely candidate than Sharon Stone, since she is all Latin bounce and twinkle and ...”

“... another. In the new era Magdalen was headed by Herbert Warren, a man bursting with all the energy, self-belief and ambition of the imperialist Victorian. He was also a hearty and a snob, who did all he could to recruit aristocrats and muscular Christians. Among his prize captures were Prince Chichibu of Japan and later the Prince of Wales (known as ‘the ...”

“... right to point to massive tax evasion on the part of Greek shipowners, wealthy businessmen and the self-employed, particularly lawyers and doctors (as few as a third of the latter declare incomes of more than 12,000 euros) as one of the principal reasons for the current debt mountain. Greece really is a country in which only the little people pay taxes. It ...”

“... of the lot. Her skills lay first in her expansive approach to visual media. As an artist, she was self-taught, and for a while earned a living in graphic design. Books as things were part of her life (her husband, Knut Schendel, owned a bookstore at the centre of São Paulo culture) and she retained an apparently inexhaustible passion for the graphic ...”

“... be interested in going back to school. Seventeen miles away was Beloit College. In his first year Self Help by Samuel Smiles, the Malcolm Gladwell of the 1850s, was the course book in biography – it left its mark on him and on his memoir. Hence my disappointment on Christmas morning. Christian turns out the clear, sturdy sentences of a lawyer who’s given ...”

“... That people in general are just not very good at being people, at being anything as coherent as a self, and that the writer’s slogan is entirely wrong? He should be saying: ‘Forget the original and the copy, just try to get a modicum of consistency into your wobbling life.’ This thought is confirmed by the film’s most haunting stylistic ...”

“... fieldwork (and deal with the breathing problem) by going to sleep and inhabiting a Na’vi second self, becoming an avatar of otherness, complete with long tail, striped skin, blue face, flat nose and an extra foot or two of height. Our hero, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), likes the role especially because in his human form he has lost the use of his legs, and ...”

“... qualified) because of his support for legal abortion and assisted dying: ‘Zealous, obsessive and self-righteous … fanaticism and lack of social grace … unmarried and without children … Though of Jewish origin, he is an aggressive secularist … his tone of pious ideological certainty … baseless rumours about his sexuality.’ It takes nerve to run ...”

“... in brief bouts of beating Sabina, which don’t seem like much of a departure from his ordinary self – unless we think the difference between the quiet autocrat and the violent one is the difference that counts. Sabina meanwhile matures, becomes an analyst, marries and is pregnant when we last see her. If her madwoman is a bit stereotypical at the ...”

“... headless dog with phallus. This figure, Nature Study, is identified by Bourgeois as ‘a self-portrait, an animal metamorphosis of the artist’. This identification is typical. Mother and father, husband and children, childhood and betrayal are the source of the feelings the work builds on. In 1996 she stitched a handkerchief with the words ‘I ...”

“... forms of behaviour are possible without it or outside it: what chances of decency, justice and self-respect; what varieties of licence, too. The simultaneous release of a DVD version of Delmer Daves’s classic 3.10 to Yuma (1957) and James Mangold’s remake of the same film – there is even a trailer for the new movie among the special features of the ...”