“... extras in a Hollywood epic – large, swarming, full of energy. They make Nosferatu’s mournful self-pity – it’s not easy living an eternal life, he says, and seems to regret his addiction to blood almost as much as he enjoys it – look very low-spirited by comparison. Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz in the Herzog movie) is sent to Transylvania to get ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... character. As I read on, I got angrier: the manhours, the money that was wasted, the pettiness, self-importance and stupidity. Why should they have established a file on me? Of what importance to the US Government was my personal, political or professional life? Well, as they eventually seem to have found out, I was of no importance to them at all. And ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from one of Goya’s anti-clerical drawings asks to be compared with a photograph of Casals in self-imposed exile writing what might be a letter asking for funds (this was many years after the war) for ageing Spanish exiles.It was a war in which style could be matched to event. Picasso’s games with anatomy – at once dangerous and playful – had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the proposed change in the French retirement age. She’s funny too, but a bit too brusque and self-contained, as we realise when she announces to herself that she is not to be pitied. Of course not. When after 25 years of marriage her husband leaves her for another woman, she asks him why he didn’t just get on with his double life and keep quiet about ...”

“... Bern until 1 December. Perhaps wherever one sees Soutine the experience is going to be violent, self-contradictory, disorientating. But the contrast between the immaculate physical setting – with its black or white gallery walls, some curved and some straight, small rooms, long passageways, snug little mezzanine at the end and introspective pebble beach ...”

“... Sam Shaw, Milton Greene – but there was little doubt among any of them that Marilyn was a self-portraitist working in collaboration. When the compositional duties fall to a painter, the result is often stunning but bereft: Marilyn isn’t there. Willem de Kooning’s 1954 oil on canvas, with its swooshes of yellow, is in the show, but the soul of the ...”

“... is forging currency. The Dittisham episode is the strongest in the novel and its visionary self-sufficiency suggests that it arose in Carey’s imagination separately from the rest of the book. I fancy Carey gives us a clue to the genesis of this material, in the form of a very specific and well-researched reference to an early 19th-century ...”

“... choose among, they would need to be ‘educated for choice’. If they didn’t make the necessary self-adjustments, Americans would continue to suffer from their cultural contradictions. How otherwise could wild college life be reconciled with the humdrum career that followed? The answer, Mead believed, was for people to design a personal culture. Twenty ...”

“... hare and kill it: there’s no escape, the track is encased by walls. The hare’s typical act of self-defence, to turn back on itself so dramatically that it throws off its pursuers, marvelled at by hunters for centuries, isn’t available: the locomotive blocks its path. ‘Each outcry of the hunted hare/A fibre from the brain does tear,’ Blake said, but ...”

“... The process does not treat particular judgments as unrevisable givens, or general principles as self-evident axioms, so it need not be conservative: it can lead to radical revision of some of the considered judgments with which one begins. But it must take intuitive value judgments as starting points, and in order to dismiss some of those judgments as ...”