“... concentrate on gun safety and environmental awareness – and those who bought their guns for self-defence, and had no interest in ever leaving Washington. You know who won.One of the things Johnson wanted, and blamed the NRA for not letting him get, was a national registry of all the guns in the country. NRA lobbying was still in its infancy, but when ...”

“... free himself from his alcoholism, drug addiction and chronic depression was not psychoanalysis but self-analysis. Almost every day from 1979 to 1999 he talked into a tape recorder, which is the equivalent of arraigning yourself in your own court and getting off on good behaviour. ‘You can’t lie to yourself,’ he said, with a straight face.By then, pickled ...”

“... it’s so full of mannered and repetitive remarks, and because Cocteau works so hard at his self-admiration. ‘I am the model of an anti-intellectual,’ he says, but only a certain sort of intellectual would say any such thing. The sort who speaks grandly of ‘the accident we call life’ and ‘that dreadful state of childhood from which I shall ...”

“... sometimes too like a little group of Harvard-educated sophisticates. But Vendler is sufficiently self-aware to know that she shouldn’t sound as though she is excluding people from the charmed circle of intimacy which she believes the lyric creates. Her very orthodox canon (Yeats, Blake, Stevens, Whitman, Heaney) has always had space for women poets: Emily ...”

“... is also its author, the other pertinent genre becomes autobiography. Pope, the most anxiously self-curating of writers, recognised as much when he issued what might have struck readers as a rather premature gathering of his own compositions in 1717. He was not yet thirty years old, but already a seasoned toyer with the facts. Recalling his early years and ...”

“... inequity leaves open the possibility of chaos, and creates endless opportunities for individual self-aggrandisement. But it seems to me that the risks were worth taking, now that we’ve seen the dismal results of our 20-year-long experiments with centralised targets, management echelons and paper-based accountability. A couple of years ago I spent several ...”

“... a black-and-white film of an execution, followed by a repeated shot of an engraving, a Rembrandt self-portrait, black eyes staring, face frozen. This man really does seem to have seen what we have just seen. I’m naming names because that seems to be the quickest way of conveying something of the effect of what’s on the screen, but gesture is also ...”

“... Wilkinson), apparently filming a television interview at home. He gives way to his younger self (Jude Law), who is staying at almost empty and not quite derelict Grand Budapest Hotel. He meets the owner, who turns out to be Zero, played in age by F. Murray Abraham. He has inherited the hotel from Monsieur Gustave who inherited from Tilda Swinton. Zero ...”

“... Mrs Queen, recounts the time he spent with the Prince Philip cult in the village of Yaohnanen.* A self-proclaimed Philip fan since childhood, Baylis doesn’t shy away from highlighting the obvious oddity that Britain’s most famous racist should be worshipped on an island of black people. We ought to respect Tannese belief, Baylis says, but at the same time ...”

“... Muslims, even recognising a Tatar puppet government. The Bolsheviks soon shattered any hopes of self-determination. Under Soviet rule, the Tatars suffered forced collectivisation, mass arrests and famine; as elsewhere in Russia’s Muslim borderlands, Bolshevik cadres destroyed mosques, confiscated religious endowments and persecuted mullahs. In the autumn ...”

“... it to the fore. Höch also recognised just how much cultures invest in myths and ideologies of self. I can think of no more acute examination of this topic than the series of montages that she put together in 1924-30 and grouped under the title Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (From an Ethnographic Museum). To look at these constructions, each a remix of ...”

“... Chichester (until 9 February). ‘Colour Her Gone’ (1962) The paintings start with an oil self-portrait from 1955, when she was a 17-year-old just enrolled at Wimbledon School of Art. There, she attracted a lot of attention. When a male student sitting opposite her in the canteen asked her why she wore such bright red lipstick, she lunged ...”

“... Rights, which has been years in the making as a result of their unwillingness to fund it. A self-interested and outdated view of sovereignty is still the best defence for African presidents, veiling their own accountability and overriding the fundamental rights of their citizens. 2 ...”

“... The nostalgia that colours the writing is for something that was never fully experienced and a self that is never constituted: ‘The thing about being very young, as you are, is the permeability/Of one person to another.’ This feeds the desire to be recognised and to connect which roars out of the page in moments of strikingly simple language: ‘He has ...”

“... and the keen, mild interest of the Aran Islanders, who have great good manners and no shortage of self-esteem. It can’t be easy being the object of a century of tourist curiosity, but these people have a steady gaze. The world comes to them and then it leaves. Somehow it feels as though the visitors, and not the inhabitants, are on display.The biggest ...”