“... Rego sat at the back of the class and painted from her imagination. ‘Of course one becomes very self-conscious at art school,’ she told her son hesitantly during an interview in 2016, ‘being a day-girl, not being an intellectual, the restricted way of teaching in those days – the Euston Road method, which I could not do. You lose your – it’s not ...”

“... which she asked White to put in his rubbish bin’ and then spent the meal bragging about her self-sufficiency.Born in 1902 in a suburb of Sydney, she grew up in a home similar to the one she would describe in The Man Who Loved Children. Her mother died when she was very young and she lived in the chaotic, messy household of her father and his second ...”

“... Leaked internal emails from Sony Pictures in 2014 showed in detail how Hollywood studios exercise self-censorship, trying to guess what Chinese censors might not like and altering or cutting scenes. An attack by aliens on the Great Wall in the original version of Pixels (2015) was carefully excised, in order not to upset the censor. In recent years, more ...”

“... also called distinguished medical witnesses who testified that his condition had robbed him of all self-control, amounting to an impulse ‘so strong that nothing short of a physical impossibility would prevent him from performing an act which his delusion might compel him to do’. The jury found McNaughton not guilty on grounds of insanity, and he was ...”

“... a united island. If this is the outcome of Brexit for Northern Ireland, it will be a curious, self-inflicted defeat for the unionist community. Among the province’s political parties, only the DUP supported the Leave campaign. The Tories’ new ‘friends and allies’ gained influence after the Good Friday Agreement, which split the Ulster Unionist ...”

“... patriotic loyalty runs out. By 1066 the long-suffering English population had had eighty years of self-interested squabbling among their ruling classes. It wasn’t just Æthelred’s mother who must have ‘look[ed] on with dismay’ at this. One might say of Hastings, as the chronicler said of Ulfcytel’s battle in 1004: ‘If [the home team] had been up ...”

“... for her ‘quick-coming millennium’, warning that the ‘cold truth’ might eventually dawn on self-sacrificing idealists that ‘the people thank them not.’ Daniell responded with fervour, but Baillie, another of Rowbotham’s rebellious six, was undaunted, filling Liberty with his thoughts on Proudhon and Kropotkin. ‘They had all turned their backs ...”

“... to him that he should put on his mask. Ruefully, he did so. While I felt the glow that only self-satisfaction can bring, he will hate me for the rest of his days. During my time wandering from church to church, a friend gave me a book called From Darkness to Light: Writers in Museums 1798-1898, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Katherine Manthorne ...”

“... of presence, of embodiment and of referentiality, on the stand. In their numerous portraits and self-portraits in costume and with their character heads derived from now unnamed models (black and white), Rembrandt and his contemporaries, including his pupils Dou and Flinck, consciously and playfully explored the boundaries and fluid interplay between the ...”

“... her book to help change minds and increase empathy, encouraging ‘the work to educate one’s self and to listen with a humble heart, to understand another’s experience from their perspective’. Yet she tells stories of migration without revealing any empathy for the history of foreign black migrants or for the contemporary migrants from other parts of ...”

“... him; St Catherine of Siena of marrying Jesus, who gives her his foreskin for a ring (the lack of self-awareness among our pre-Freudian forebears is prelapsarian; these nocturnal experiences held no shame). Magdalena of the Cross jerks in satanic couplings with a devil called Balban, who is exorcised from her body and exits in the form of a caterpillar ...”

“... servant. The names are a tease. Although a lord, Wimsey is intellectually astringent; Vane isn’t self-regarding, nor does she swivel in every passing wind. It is a lively, sometimes spiky novel, but the ideas are laid out on a plate and Wade is overdoing it when she calls it her ‘greatest’. How many of Sayers’s other fictions are merely ...”

“... out of storage, which he hopes to raise by selling Alex’s last confession, a coked-up monologue self-recorded onto three videotapes.Despentes wrote Vernon Subutex almost in real time. The first book appeared in France on 7 January 2015 – the day of the Charlie Hebdo shootings – and the third in 2017. The trilogy has been a huge commercial success and ...”

“... a large number of arrests. His message, that Putin and his clan are not sincere nationalists but self-interested thieves, is essentially a conservative one, which is the reason that it’s threatening.The US and European national security establishment has unsurprisingly sought to frame the scandal in a way that suits them. In Britain, the Royal United ...”

“... the rewilding of its urban spaces along the Mediterranean coast and the restoration of Egyptian self-rule. The girdle-wearers, ‘being followers of Typhon’ (the Greek name for Seth, the Egyptian god of Chaos), ‘will slay themselves’, he says, imagining the stench of unburied corpses pervading the city. His oracle is both a political prophecy about ...”