“... a censor sitting in an office, blue pencil in hand and red tea by his side: Chinese censorship is self-censorship, and although what to avoid is generally known, the discussions about limits take place between writer and publisher, not writer and state, and can be more flexible than we imagine. Murong also told us about the latest Chinese meme: an old clip ...”

“... Eckersberg’s work is always highly considered and well executed; but posterity is ruthlessly self-interested, and inevitably parts of his work plead in vain. Some subjects engage us less fully, less directly. Also, we now give as much attention to the preliminary drawing and the sketch as to the finished work: indeed, ‘finish’ is almost a suspect ...”

“... the Observer to find it impossible to believe that their faces are not portraits, quite possibly self-portraits. This may be a more comforting tale to tell than the one to which scholars of this material generally subscribe: that the use of a system of ‘module and mass production’ accounts for the diversity. The phrase was coined by the German art ...”

“... organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state ...”

“... have noted that Le Diable, probablement reverses the plot, such as it is, of Un condamné. The self-condemned young man does not escape but goes to his death by assisted suicide. Fontaine, the hero of Un condamné, is a French Resistance fighter arrested by the Germans in Lyon in 1943. We see him try to escape in the opening sequences of the movie; and see ...”

“... of propaganda films, it was not politics, or even patriotism, that inspired Olga, so much as self-preservation. Never allowing her Russian name and origins to be a liability, she somehow managed to remain a star. It was only in the closing weeks of the war, as the Red Army neared the German capital, that she had to face up to her divided loyalties. In ...”

“... the world; the Jewish propensity to seek atonement has been replaced by pious arrogance and self-righteousness. Their position is not unlike that of the Crusaders when they realised that the Kingdom of Jerusalem they had built in the Holy Land was merely an island in a hostile Islamic world. Or that of the white settlers in Africa, whose enclaves have ...”

“... But given the nature of this lifelong project, there is astonishingly little anger, moralising or self-righteousness in his writing. It was not exactly a case of tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner: he had an unusual capacity to record, without forgiveness or nostalgia, the unfolding of a painful national story. And he understood that this story was his ...”

“... men played then. Real good players.’ I’d watched young men at pool in Rock’s Coffee Shop, self-confidently rolling with their sea-ice cakewalk round the table: denims and bandanas, outdoor-booted, quietly competitive, but less to win than figure a trajectory, the likelihood of one uncertainty against another, the slice, clack and negotiated tangent to ...”

“... and criminal are connected – they are brothers, secret sharers, divided halves of the same self. In Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, the investigators find themselves taking on many of the outward roles of the men they investigate: they live in their rooms, perform their jobs or wear their clothes. By the end of both novels, the detectives have ...”

“... The Horned Man, however, is concerned with the campus only up to a point: its world is not self-enclosed, and can hardly be so, set as the college is in a decaying suburbia connected by the Metrorail to a city governed by a similarly disciplinary regime, although not one motivated by political correctness. Miller more than once invokes Angelo in ...”

“... Anna Magnani we see in the film clip on TV. And Almodóvar’s direction is discreet and funny, self-conscious without going quite as far as irony. Before all the violence and melodrama starts, Raimunda is washing up the dishes in the kitchen. A sudden shot from directly overhead shows her handsome cleavage and a large kitchen knife. We’ve already seen ...”

“... in 1905, and not, as Clyde says, 1897.) A cardinal point of Joycean myth was the provincial self-absorption of Revivalist Ireland, but the record of a journal like Dana suggests anything but general literary paralysis: as well as rejecting Joyce’s inchoate ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ in 1904, it outspokenly attacked the Church and the Revival, as ...”

“... us that Rosalind Krauss sees Man Ray’s objects, such as the eggbeater labelled Man (a partial self-portrait as well as a joke), as resisting the logic of exchange of which so much has been and so readily made. My favourite manifestation of this refusal is Picabia’s signature as a drawing, shown in these pages, which Baker calls an extraordinary ...”

“... Simple societies and small communities, lacking this, need other ways of preventing resort to self-help and violence each time a dispute arises. Communal pressure on the parties to find a compromise is one way, akin to modern methods of mediation. Another is to encourage or permit the parties to find their own judge or judges and to agree to abide by ...”