“... mania takes the form of an unrelenting fight, an obsessional pursuit of his enemies, a limitless self-aggrandisement, his weaponised messages fired out into the world as a barrage of daily tweets, keeping going at all costs – because what would happen if he stopped? How odd that Trump may well give us back the law as he is forced to submit to the law and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by Donovan Bayley    Richard Panton falls down the stairs and is separated from his subliminal self, which takes the form of a midget. With this loss, Panton himself shrinks and becomes an identical midget. They argue. The midget Panton beats the subliminal midget to death and regains his usual size. Fortunately, Mrs Panton has been away the whole ...”

“... in the Grenfell Tower fire at the age of 24, two days after she had been invited to contribute. Self-portraits made in wet-plate collodion tintypes, as used in the early photography of the 1860s and 1870s, they show Saye interacting with objects from Gambian spiritual rituals, including cowrie shells and a cow horn: they look like a fabulous intersection ...”

“... meaning, they have Nabokov’s charm. His tendency to act out versions of his loftiest, lordliest self – a ‘set of attitudes, prejudices, habits, remarks, performances which is highly visible, highly stylised, and which I find dull and narrow’, as Michael Wood put it – is not present. Instead we find him struggling with sleep, dreaming about ...”

“... what it would be like to swap identities. What if I hadn’t lost my bag but had found a self? What if my lost property belonged to someone else now, all those white T-shirts and black jeans and pullovers from Joe Bloggs? It seemed a writer’s problem to me, the first of many, and I enjoyed the scheme of unreason, the daft possibilities, as I ...”

“... of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang – except it’s a monument to capital rather than revolutionary self-reliance. Both towers are steep pyramids, stretched vertically until they reach insane heights above the river they stand beside, with a viewing platform at the top drawing tourists from all quarters to see the low-rise city from an impossible angle. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Carrie, that he has much idea what the power might be for. All these men are immensely wary and self-conscious, determined not to sell out as fast or as publicly as some other generations. Coppola is trying to bypass the old Hollywood by taking as much control of the process as he can: he has set up a studio, Zoetrope, which he hopes will provide a complete ...”