“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... old flame for the same reason he can’t commit to his marriage – or anything else but his own self-absorption. The eternal sameness of everyone else is not a fact of this film’s life but a projection of Stone’s defence against experience; of his unacknowledged clinging to a lonely male stereotype. Lisa is an exception, an Anomalisa as Stone puts ...”

“... and casting them off just as quickly. This finds comic expression in Duchamp’s photographic self-portraits as Rrose Sélavy (‘Eros, c’est la vie’), his female alter ego, and in Multiple Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1917), in which the pensive pipe-smoking artist is multiplied, using mirrors, into five clones around a table. A similar air of ...”

“... in the North of England by the Conservatives. Denunciations of Labour’s metropolitan self-satisfaction were interrupted occasionally by vague speculation as to whether Scotland’s recovery from the pandemic might be ruined by the ‘distraction’ of a vote on independence. English voters don’t get much Scottish news, but Scottish voters get ...”

“... Fragonard in his bones, alongside Renoir, Redon, Miró, Dufy. Again, at the level of opinion and self-reflection Dubuffet was undoubtedly sincere in his wish to escape from that inheritance – he spent much of his career pouring scorn on the paintings he saw on the Rive Gauche – but he was no kind of fool: he knew full well that every movement of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”