“... of his trousers, his bare ankles, his mustard-yellow slippers. Cooke had many modes. A melancholic self-portrait from 1954 (not included in this show) recalls the work of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker with its intense dark-eyed stare; the woman in The Black Hat from 1970 is Modigliani-ish in the glowing yellow of her skin, the inclination of her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... this work, or misunderstand it. Works by non-professional makers – sometimes called ‘self-taught’, ‘outsider’ or ‘outlier’ – have been making their way into art institutions for some time, but Black women artists who work with textiles are still far less likely to be celebrated for their artistry than for their technical skills. The ...”

“... out full size but had to be enlarged. Beardsley was always learning.In 1894 he made a block print, Self-Portrait in Bed, in which a doll-like head is tucked between voluminous bedclothes under a great canopy, the bedpost supported by a hermaphrodite satyr. It was a rare direct reference to the delicacy of his health, which now began to decline. ‘I believe I ...”

“... appear strikingly contemporary.Unlike other Parisian institutions from the revolutionary era that self-consciously appropriated royal or religious buildings – the Louvre or the Panthéon, for example – the museum’s contents are in clear conversation with the space they occupy, the former monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. In this temple of ...”

“... Hoover, whose name (or its diminutive, CoHo) is never far from the lips of BookTokers, was a self-published author until her 2016 dark romance It Ends with Us was rediscovered by TikTok in 2021. Cue thousands of crying videos and twenty million sales. Now she occupies seven of the top ten spots on the New York Times paperback fiction list. It Starts with ...”

“... lot, since the Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and 1980s (the setting for the movie) bred self-proclaimed geniuses in the way Sheffield used to produce knives and forks.Manchester – as opposed to ‘Madchester’, that later, Kangol-hatted, dungareed, spliff-wielding horror-show, c.1986, which gave the world such neanderthal hedonists as the Stone ...”

“... The author of The Founder of Diabolism, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, was sentenced to three years for self-publishing and distributing a minor erotic work.There is a funny video clip imagining a young BL writer who has just passed the civil service exam seeking advice from a female lawyer:Writer: Can I continue writing sexy BL stories while working for the ...”

“... what to do with mendacity at this scale. Its smaller instances are just exercises in political self-flattery: choosing misleading GDP statistics, or making tendentious claims about the tax burden, or claiming British credit for falling global energy prices. Behind them is a more pervasive lie about whether it is possible to run an advanced ...”

“... and writers about how to square up to it: at one extreme, miraculous feats of geo-engineering and self-imposed limits on climate-harming activity; at the other, massive investments in renewables to offset undiminished consumerism; between the two a range of positions including a plea for degrowth. This long conversation gave breadth and urgency to NLR’s ...”

“... Belle Époque (though not so named until four decades later), France in 1900 was an anxious and self-critical place. At the start of the 19th century, it had been the most populated of the Great European powers; now, it was the sparsest. The demographer Jacques Bertillon noted of France’s rivals that ‘they are all growing, all becoming more ...”

“... The paintings of old people. The paintings of boys and young men. The paintings of old women. The self-portraits, the genre groups. I paid attention to the characterful frames, a wonderfully diverse array, some of them like no frames I have ever seen. I went back to my favourites, then round those pieces I thought I might have overlooked. My favourites ...”

“... no committee.’ So Cabinet ministers had their first experience of having to negotiate with a self-confessed Marxist. We just kept telling them that we couldn’t have proper talks until they released Nelson Mandela and unbanned the ANC. Nelson knew we were working for him. When the Commonwealth Eminent Persons’ Group came out, he gave ex-President ...”

“... how those trapped in the situation could have taken those other ways out. War with Argentina is self-evidently a ludicrous way of making the simple point that a transfer of sovereignty ought to take place only with the consent of the Falklanders; thirteen months of hardship, picket-line battles, lost production and the huge expenses of generating ...”

“... scenario, finds himself identifying with the idolatrous mob, he also admires Moses because of his self-control. He is an object of emulation for Freud because he does not take quick revenge on the idolators: he suffers their difference. This essay of Freud’s, written in 1913, clearly also refers implicitly to Jung’s defection; though, ironically, in this ...”