“... a fountain on her college campus in a bikini, until a security guard asks her to leave. ‘I’m self-absorbed,’ Dunham has said, ‘but I’m not ...”

“... idea this exhibition was, makes the connection to Poussin’s contrary (though not, as I hear it, self-vaunting) ‘Je n’ai rien négligé.’ But the rose on the unlovely pebble also reminds me of Poussin’s habit of bringing back bits of wood, stones, moss, lumps of earth from his rambles by the Tiber; and the story of him reaching down among the ruins ...”

“... Thirty, Argo recounts an old secret mission in Iran. Is there a worry here? An act of national self-reassurance? An uneasy celebration of questionable moments? An easy celebration? Whatever the answers to these questions, they have nothing to do with Quentin Tarantino’s Django. This is a violent and lurid movie lover’s movie, alternating fluently ...”

“... if, their evidence is ‘decisive’ or ‘potentially decisive’. The logic of this is arguably self-defeating. If a piece of evidence is not capable of contributing to the decision (and therefore of being potentially decisive), it ought not to be admitted at all. In any event, where the trial is by jury and the verdict consists of one word, it is often ...”

“... to imagine how baffled she would have been by that. But without losing sight of the absurdity, self-aggrandisement and malice in Whitehouse’s interventions, Thompson achieves a degree of intelligent sympathy with her. He resists the recent argument that she was a proto-feminist, but points out that some of her complaints specifically targeted the ...”

“... the protagonist of We Need to Talk about Kevin, Pandora is meant to be seen as a highly competent self-made businesswoman. In We Need to Talk about Kevin the narrator is profiled in Fortune magazine; here it’s a cover story for New York Magazine. Yet Pandora has no trouble taking leave from her doll company. Brother and sister rent an apartment together and ...”

“... her, and then the sexting began. It consisted of some banal obscenities and another batch of lewd self-portraits. Amid fairly tame scenarios of hotels and ‘fuckme shoes’ (Weiner seems not to have been able to lose himself completely: she calls him perfect and he says, ‘I’m deeply flawed’), he told her he was ‘an argumentative, perpetually ...”

“... 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 ...”