“... peoples seemed to promise that small nation-states and imperial territories could look forward to self-determination. Women, many of whom had been active in war work, wanted a role in shaping the peace. Those who had opposed militarism were also optimistic that women might find a place in the postwar settlement.This was not, as historians have tended to ...”

“... private publication in 1883 of an English translation – a project fronted by the Orientalising self-promoter Richard Burton – there have been a great number of illustrated versions. To many, the Kāmasūtra’s connection with India is almost incidental. Most do not know what the text as a whole is like: the best-known portions take up only one of its ...”

“... paper that came to hand.’Long afterwards, the prime minister Édouard Herriot praised her as a self-taught wonder: ‘No education at the École, no teacher. Pure instinct.’ Only the first statement is true. Valadon took lessons by watching Puvis, Lautrec, Renoir and others at work, noting their materials, techniques and process, their props and sources ...”

“... and fashion and sexual display rather than settling down to their natural and God-ordained role as self-effacing mothers and household drudges. Most women used corsets to narrow their waists only (only?) a few inches, Steele claims, but even tight-lacing – subject of many medical warnings, sermons and humorous prints, not to mention the scene in Gone with ...”

“... an engineer from West Cork, said they were, meaning a breed of new Irish, forward-looking and self-reliant, with both an upright fidelity to their Irish birthright and a taste for Schubert on the gramophone and a ‘cognac-een’. Their bi-racial origins and bilingual practices uniquely qualified his family to live in the utopian Ireland which Jack ...”

“... would want to appear, it was because since childhood she had been anxiously polishing her own self-image. Born in 1741 in Switzerland to a Swiss mother and an Austrian father, Kauffman was an accomplished artist by the age of 12. It was then that she painted the first of her many self-portraits and the last in which she ...”

“... When we say that nobody but God can see into a human heart, ‘nobody’ includes one’s own self, ‘if only because our sense of unequivocal reality is so bound up with the presence of others that we can never be sure of anything that only we ourselves know and no one else’. The consequence of this is that our entire psychological life is cursed with ...”

“... class system, a wild colonial boy who stands for the ‘ordinary’ man. There is a certain self-conscious filial piety here. His father, Keith Murdoch, was partly responsible for establishing the received view of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, in which thousands of heroic Australians and New Zealanders were sacrificed to the incompetence and ...”

“... with Dix encouraged its rivals to hire agony aunts of their own. Soon they were appearing in more self-consciously serious publications such as Lansbury’s Labour Weekly and the Miner. Though the audience for these columns was often assumed by both editors and readers to be female, half of Dix’s letter writers were male. Mainly, and predictably, they wrote ...”

“... for the Sam she knows. Her friend, her only son. Elisa recoils from the choices her other self has made, and the reader recoils with her, but she is hardly in a position to pass judgment, since her horror at herself and her life in the world in which Silas has survived amounts to wishing her son dead. She never explicitly asks herself whether it’s ...”

“... can only mean a greater or smaller degree of collaboration in a civilised society’s process of self-destruction.’ To build, he suggested, would be to take part in the crime of the century, that is to say, the destruction of the traditional European city. ‘I can only make architecture,’ he said in the 1970s, ‘because I do not build. I do not build ...”

“... after 9/11 set out to change all that. With the designation of unlawful combatant it created a self-sustaining doctrine that there are individuals who, having attacked the US or opposed it by force, have forfeited all rights both as combatants and civilians: in short, a new class of outlaw. The potential impact of this doctrine on the morality of state ...”

“... who subjected truth and reason to political passion and deified the nation’s immediate self-interest. ‘They seem to clamour: “Finally we are allowed to adore ourselves and our wish to be great, not good.”’ Written in the mid-1920s, these words call to mind the slogans totalitarian politicians were soon to adopt. In Mussolini’s ...”

“... but widened afterwards. Certain details have survived: he recalls explaining in a ‘hushed and self-important’ voice to the headteacher, two days after her death, why he hasn’t done his homework. But much from that time remains a mystery, and there are as many questions as answers in the account. For instance, it’s unfathomable to Frayn how his ...”

“... foreseeable effect on the future. And musings of that sort may help to establish a personality, a self of sorts, that provides connections between past, present and future. Driven to it, we might even claim to discern a structural relationship between events in childhood, youth, middle age and old age, chronologically remote elements that pertain to one ...”