“... wine: Cameriere, Vesuvio bianco per le signori! Signori? Quali? Dove? You OK? Sit there, talk to self all bloody day. But Tischbein had torn his sketch out of his book me, half finished with a haunted look. Behind me smudged with spilled Vesuvial wine a cloud from the crater shaped like Pliny’s pine. I picked it up but in one blinding flash it erupted into ...”

“... it is because of this oscillation in attention between the minuscule and the vast, the self-evident and the ungraspably complex. There are secrets to discover. You can pick your way through the fridge mountain to get to the shop; in the office there is a monitor showing CCTV footage from the antechamber in the hotel. Elsewhere, in the recess behind ...”

“... as clichés usually are. ‘I used to be with it,’ Grampa says in one episode with remarkable self-awareness, ‘but then they changed what “it” was.’ Cartoons are funny not, generally, because they exaggerate but because they are so lucid and so clearly defined, because they streamline physical features and have people say what we ordinarily only ...”

“... both his personal myth and the basis of his early reputation. The mood often looks like sorrow, or self-incomprehension, or a stunted, irritated curiosity. But it is always submerged, working through denial. The face is still, the gestures calm, everything moves slowly, maybe he will fall asleep in mid-scene. But the sense of real danger is constant, and this ...”

“... William Dobson’s powerful portrait of Van Dyck’s friend Endymion Porter. Compare it with the self-portrait with Porter that Van Dyck painted ten years earlier and you see the thickening of age and weight of care descend on a man. Dobson died in poverty at the age of 36. Porter went into exile, returned destitute to London in 1649 and died in the same ...”

“... is partly sour grapes: Benn was far from immune to personal vanity, hence the need for regular self-scourging. But it also reflected his strong sense that the role was a poisoned chalice for anyone seeking to hold fast to his or her convictions. A new suit and a haircut will never be enough to persuade the doubters – and the idea that Foot had undergone ...”

“... where the publicity machine wants to turn her into a disco-dancing avatar of her old out-of-film self, but she gets over that. And the songs she sings in her own voice – that is, the voice the plain girl might have been discovered to have – are old-fashioned ballads (‘When the sun goes down/And the band won’t play’;‘Don’t wanna give my heart ...”

“... come with three acres and a pile of manure, but the first garden city had its own version of civic self-sufficiency. Construction began in 1903 after a competition to design a town that demonstrated the ideas of Ebenezer Howard. Howard’s book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform was loosely based on the work of Henry George and, following George’s ...”

“... reducing the action to minimal but memorable formulae, often concealing faces, as when the self-loathing of Judas is concentrated into a hunched back and a clenched fist, or when the Magi prostrate themselves like subject rulers in an Assyrian relief, or when Mary Magdalene is made to seem part of the rock on which the cross is raised. ‘Christ ...”

“... at me: ‘Bill Gates! We know where you live!’ He didn’t mean it as a compliment.) That self-awareness is one of the reasons Gates is a marginally more attractive human being than Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. It’s undeniably a fact that the work done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in child health and education has saved ...”

“... in their New York lofts, surrounded by big, painterly abstract pictures suggest lives in which self-reference has become burdensome. As time passed both Guston and Rothko started to paint darker pictures. In photographs of Monet at work on the Nymphéas in his vast studio at Giverny the nearby reality which is the source of what he is painting is ...”

“... and industry. That chaos is now more often acknowledged than challenged by architects. The self-generated complexity of cities strains the infrastructure of roads, pipes and cables, stretches the language of building regulation and planning law, and throws up petition-signing protest groups at the drop of a computer-generated perspective. It is a ...”

“... numerous, who, as tourists and students, support the city’s main business: being its beautiful self. We also bring problems. The points made by the speakers at the conference are as simple as the problems are intractable. They are not unique to this city but this city, being the most perfect, most famous, most desirable, most ancient magnet of its ...”

“... it/swimming just under the surface?’ On the other hand: why does it matter? The poem becomes a self-portrait – this writer, in this place, holding these memories, at this time, alongside this lover. The animals he encounters, like the rocks, serve the interpersonal, and the scraps of story serve the way that Gander depicts his states of mind, now ...”

“... he showed when young into something remarkable was contact with other artists. In the compelling self-portrait drawing of around 1824-25, as memorable as any by an English artist, he seems both vulnerable and determined. He was then just out of his teens; a couple of years earlier he had been sought out by an older artist, John Linnell, who had seen and ...”