Records of Mr. Milosevic's domestic phone calls offer bits of conversations that are by turns tender and hilarious, as he deals, for instance, with the vanity of his son, Marko.
It is easy to see why the daffodil, symbol of hope and rebirth, is associated with the vanity of the Greek youth Narcissus, transfixed forever nodding in approval at his glorious reflection.
In 1896 Brahms completed his Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), for bass voice and piano, on texts from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, a pessimistic work dealing with the vanity of all earthly things and welcoming death as the healer of pain and weariness.
"Sometimes with the vanity of the actor, you go, 'Oh, it's not a big part,' but on that set, it didn't feel like a small part.
As a group, these ungodly creatures -- rounded out by two dusty servants (Orjan Ramberg and Ingvar Kjellson) -- bring to mind one of Goya's depictions of simian aristocrats, cancerous with vanity, or a tableau of upper-crust gargoyles out of Dickens.
Tony McNulty, a Home Office minister, dismissed Davis's campaign as a "complete circus, tinged with vanity with a bit of self-delusion" and hinted that the true motive lay in shadow cabinet divisions which had yet to be unearthed.
She carried her glucose meter around, but didn't like to use it regularly, especially when she was with friends, a vanity of hers.
And in that moment — politeness mixing perhaps with the brief vanity of imagining that a novel might strike to the heart of a monster — my pen blabbed, "To Rupert Murdoch from Julian Barnes".
Some reflect the bludgeoning, dulling force of directorial will to bravura exertions that seemingly declare, with the pompous vanity of each image, that they are important, that they are artists.
