“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lebanon. But the madness is not just Israeli. Much of the Arab world is following the road to self-destruction, via a fundamentalist ideology that, perhaps unwittingly, reflects the worldview of Bernard Lewis’s disciples, the neo-orientalists. Lebanon is caught between Israel’s strategy and Syria’s. Israel, like the wolf in sheep’s clothing in ...”

“... bathers and dancers) or stereotyped (Cranach’s minxes and Boucher’s nymphs), or self-absorbed and unexpressive (Titian’s Venuses). Michelangelo’s subject is the human spirit manifested in the body. If faces were present in the studies, or if those in many of the finished works were not of such a uniform character, their variety and ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sincere and – strangely for such an experienced politician who clearly doesn’t lack ego or self-confidence – diffident. His air of ordinary-bloke humility contrasted with his large and, for adherents of the post-Thatcher consensus, unsettling ideas. Unsettling not so much in respect of the future as of the past – he now doubts, he says, fundamental ...”

“... life. In the 1870s, Syed Ahmed Khan, pleading for compromise, warned Muslims that their self-imposed isolation would have terrible economic consequences. In the hope of encouraging them to abandon the religious schools where they were taught to learn the Koran by rote in a language they couldn’t understand, he established the Muslim Anglo-Oriental ...”

“... Hobbes fled to Paris in fear that his absolutist views might put him in danger. He would remain in self-imposed exile for 11 years. His revision of Elements was printed in Paris in 1642, and in 1647 the new version was published in extended and revised form as De Cive. It was the final defeat and execution of the king in 1649 that provoked Hobbes to compose ...”

“... more wedded to what-works politics than the Conservatives were under Thatcher, who was openly and self-consciously ideological. Much of the present malaise in British politics flows from this. Among other things, what-works gives the wrong answers. The classic example is the 42-day detention legislation. The only rational explanation for the government’s ...”