“... but it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. A rat will do, we don’t need a Dostoevskyan self-hating rat. So what has Douglas done? He has manipulated Turner not for her sake but for the sake of his film; stolen a script and idea from Sullivan the director (‘Without me it would have stayed an idea’); and arranged for Powell’s dippy wife (very ...”

“... him burning to death.’ The trouble is that this tough talk about survival and the supremacy of self-interest is at odds with the selflessness of the pilots and all the sailors of the Little Ships, and specifically of the boy who makes it into the local newspaper. He wasn’t supposed to be on the boat sailing from Weymouth, but he wanted to be part of the ...”

“... that it will ‘decompose’ in a minute. For many years it was spoken on a tape that would ‘self-destruct’; now it is on some unspecified ‘device’. In all cases, though, it erases its information in a puff of smoke, the perfect instance of a deniable project, existing, at least until the story gets going, only in a small selection of minds. Or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he produced 21 paintings in eight months for the monastery of San Pablo el Real. He was largely self-taught but quickly absorbed the naturalism and light effects of Velázquez, who had established his reputation in Seville a few years earlier, as well as the drama of Juan Martínez Montañés’s candlelit polychrome sculptures. Zurbarán added a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It makes one yearn to collapse at once between linen sheets smoothed by Mrs Stephen and give one-self up in gratitude to the calm, unhurried, reassuring presence, the therapeutic rubbings and the beef tea. The section on the removal of crumbs from the bed is a masterpiece. This is the voice of a woman for whom the unsentimental alleviation of distress in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Miss Everything casts an appraising look at the viewer. The overall effect is one of graphic self-possession.Sherald almost always paints Black subjects, most of whom are strangers she approaches in the street. Together, they select an outfit from the sitter’s clothes (this is another key aspect of her work: her lively interest in the ways we fashion ...”

“... latter song? I ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair? Or something to do with salacious self-mythology? Sordid details following …He was born in 1961 and grew up in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, before moving to London in 1980. An exhibition label briefly notes a parallel with Barry Humphries, who made the same journey following a prankish ...”

“... bulbs from one VIP airport lounge to another. Especially as it is not always easy to share their self-pity: that, in their depths, both Sellers and Burton were racked with nostalgia for the great days of Major Bloodnok and Henry V, and also with regret at having come so far to have arrived nowhere as good, is something with which we can only briefly ...”

“... that can’t be touched’) were not so well drawn, the slide from confusion and depression into self-starvation would be inexplicable. As it is, the stratagems Willa uses to avoid eating, and to avoid confronting the fact that she is starving herself to death, come to seem psychologically credible: you begin to see why not eating might seem the only thing ...”

“... is, accordingly, already a homeland for Palestinian Arabs: it is Jordan. When those Arabs ask for self-determination they are absurdly asking for something they already have; their claim was settled in 1922, and they have no right to Judea and Samaria (what they call the West Bank) or indeed to Gaza. In 1948 Abdullah actually wanted to call the new Arab state ...”

“... disgust is tracking me, like an impossible choice between that naval bullishness and a harmless self-esteem pricking in these pastures. You know that story – or poem is it? – about the fighter crashing near a spinster village? It tells you straight how that orchid privacy – the fine asparagus mind of some high civil servant – must turn in the end to ...”