“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”