“... slammed in their faces. Indoors, meanwhile, guilt began eating away at the stingy householder’s self-justification, which, if followed by misfortune, might be expiated by the conviction that he or she was the victim of magical vengeance. Even today, my Yorkshire friend’s robustly rational partner admits that her kindness towards their travelling visitor ...”

“... a globule of paint. A familiar scene. I don’t attempt another still life. Instead, I return to self-portraits and interiors that I invent in the studio. I use a mirror and the Old Masters as my source material. Sometimes, an element of still life finds its way into a painting – the edge of a table, a plant, a vase – but always in a supporting role. I ...”

“... of the court.The act of interpretation, as the narrator performs it, requires the abstention of self in several ways:The first time you listened to an interpreter speaking, their voice might sound cold and precise and completely without inflection, but the longer you listened, the more variation you would hear. If a joke was made it was the interpreter’s ...”

“... might have a bearing on her own work: ‘It measures the distance between the dreams of a younger self and the betrayals of adulthood, with its new dreams – some vibrant, some pallid.’ Smallwood’s Dorothy is in her thirties, but adolescence lasts a lot longer than it used to. As an adjunct instructor, she has an impoverished professional future. She ...”

“... metals in most rivers is some cause for wild swimmer comfort. We have never been very good at self-regulating our water pollution. The Fleet, once a great thoroughfare, leaves the Heath to become a sewer, and is put to use quietly washing our waste out of the city. In Pope’s day, when it still ran above ground, it was so filthy that he described ...”

“... romantic. Even the act of writing a collection set in the sticks during the most capitalist, self-interested and metropolitan period of Irish history was cheeky. Of course, Barry wanted to be noticed. It was in the attitude, the swagger of his sentences, their uncontainable energy. He had cool, an American import. Barry’s concerns have changed since ...”

“... Further, the global market, rightly or wrongly, is seen as a very conservative place: the role of self-censorship, the weeding out of anything that might prove controversial, is a necessary consequence of the edu-business model. The result is courses that become ever more anodyne as they compete to imagine the inoffensive. In various departments at ...”

“... used to be one of its strengths. Certainly Hare suggested back in 1993 that the Tory absence of self-doubt was what gave them the edge in any tight contest. I’m not sure that’s true any ...”

“... Norrie’s Law – but can’t interpret them. So the gaps in knowledge are colonised by our own self-projections: Celts as untrousered children of Nature, or untamed frontiersmen, or merely as those marginal Brits who for some reason like not being English. But stumbling out of this exhibition, you begin to wonder who is peripheral to what. Maybe it’s the ...”

“... legal restrictions on stop and search and authorises the police use of weapons in cases other than self-defence. It gives broader prerogatives to the government-appointed prosecutors and limits the role of the judges in conducting investigations. The official goal is to ‘consolidate in a permanent manner the instruments and means available to administrative ...”

“... backgrounds, which glow agreeably but are best read from one viewpoint and to that extent are self-defeating. The most convincing works of the mid-1930s are those that recall another kind of non-art moving object, the orrery. In 1922, in a boat off Guatemala, Calder had seen ‘a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the ...”

“... but also shaping his public persona through his images. His best prints reflect this tension, this self-conscious to-and-fro between art and life. Munch tried to write his legacy as well as his life. Nobody, not even his housekeeper (whom he eventually sacked for interrupting his work), was allowed on the second floor of the house at Ekely, on the outskirts of ...”

“... or shame. Dürer’s woodcut of men at a bathhouse from 1496, like his awkward, angular, anxious self-portrait of 1509, seems to us more ‘naked’, and more modern – akin to the work of Schiele or Lucian Freud – than his engraving of a perfectly proportioned Apollonian Adam. The previous iteration of The Renaissance Nude in Los Angeles included a fine ...”

“... in Dubai where they had to bring in running water and electricity in order to have the show. If self-transport is your thing, Lagerfeld was your man. He raised the game. He asked for sets that were like worlds. The average fashion show is 12 minutes long and it involves buyers and journalists inspecting new clothes. But, with Lagerfeld’s shows for ...”

“... institutional critique of late 20th-century artists. She addresses desecration, vandalism, self-harm:Mocking the prospectof a museumgoer scarring the art helps me forgetabout all the times it has of course happened:acid splatter across the Dutch nude, hammer to the armof the PIETÀ. Or the pipe bomb placed besidethe high relief. Or the man who drew ...”