“... Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor and self-styled defender of Western civilisation, has been a dominant voice in American political science for thirty years. Roughly contemporary, as a Harvard graduate student in security studies, with Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Huntington failed to achieve their spectacular level of success in Washington, although he did rise to a second-tier position in the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter ...”

“... completely untrustworthy.’ I had to agree, but her refusal to contemplate the Kashmiri self-determination promised by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was troubling. These days the very suggestion seems utopian. The Abdullah dynasty continues to hold power in Kashmir and is keen to collaborate with New Delhi and enrich itself. I rang a journalist in ...”

“... With their unprecedented array of ‘lifestyle options’, their tendency to regard happiness and self-actualisation as entitlements and their habit of constantly taking their own emotional temperature, contemporary adults are poorly prepared, she argues, for the self-sacrificing work that child-rearing demands. They also ...”

“... Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing, by looking at his works in a broader context. She examined his self-presentation as a physician in his treatises and described the highly combative version of medicine practised in various public arenas: in the streets of Rome, in informal theatres set up for anatomical displays, and at the bedside of patients, crowded with ...”

“... as ‘camp’, was ‘a special kind of milieu involving flamboyant decoration, consumption and self-indulgence’. This was a world of wit, food and music – luminously depicted in Adolph von Menzel’s Flute Concert at Sanssouci, which is now in Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie. But most of Frederick’s contemporaries were aware only of the king’s ...”

“... a faculty of judgment – of approval or condemnation – since in Bosch there is no aspect of the self that is unaccompanied by its opposite; the torments of hell go hand in hand with the delights of the Golden Age. ‘The Haywain Triptych’ (c.1516) The basic instinctual paraphernalia of the inner self does ...”

“... and the Daily Mail were among the newspapers that used his services. In March this year, the self-confessed blagger turned whistleblower John Ford revealed the tactics he had used over a period of 15 years up to 2010 to obtain information illegally for newspapers; on one occasion he impersonated William Hague on the phone to get access to his bank ...”

“... New Hampshiremen Robert Frost and e.e. cummings. Creeley’s work is characterised by a tortured self-examination, and an almost panicky need to engage with interior experience by enacting it syllable by syllable, as if any misstep will send the whole poem up in flames, and perhaps its maker too. This is the poem’s drama, and it hardly ever seems ...”

“... pure as a penknife/slick through the insected air’. In Wright’s work, singular, apparently self-contained things are tied to movement, plurality or process. In Zone Journals (1988), he watches the last wind of summer in the dogwood trees: ‘Across the street, flamingoing berries’.A description reveals – or implies – something about its ...”

“... of a threatening natural space for a protective chapel ‘evokes sanctuary in a paradoxical, self-cancelling form’. The connection may seem far-fetched, but Gawain raises questions about the meaning of sanctuary vis-à-vis the natural world. Like the miracle of the stag, it asks whether human institutions such as kingship, covenant and sanctuary can ...”

“... rush of cinematic violence, but it’s driven by Arm’s turbulent inner life, a mix of tough-guy self-assurance and clumsy longing.Asked by an interviewer why all the stories in his first collection focused on young men, Barrett admitted it was ‘a limitation’. His new book shows his efforts to expand his range. Women are at the centre of a couple of the ...”

“... These tonal shadings matter because post-millennials like to state their intentions clearly. Self-labelling, especially of fine-grained sexual and gendered identities, has become an ‘imperative’. They think it important to be themselves, to admit their struggles and vulnerabilities, to say what they mean. In the iGen Corpus, a digital data bank ...”

“... readers who found the polemics of the two Vindications too rugged were delighted by the melancholy self-portrait of the Letters. All the same, there is a lot more to them than subjective egotistical Romanticism, or the delineation of a wandering female writing to a faithless lover. The thread of interest is always a double one, and the outer world is more ...”

“... of this alchemy. As Kagarlitsky points out, classic social democrats imagined a series of self-conscious and graduated reforms, mounting through universal suffrage and labour organisation, ineluctably metamorphosing state and society without violence or rupture. Kautsky, Bernstein and others thereby sought to evade the boring reform/revolution ...”

“... to do than reality-history. This is above all true of the 19th century: the period offers its self-representations lavishly and insistently, but on the whole yields its realities reluctantly. If historical research never demanded more effort than is involved in boiling down views on some topic from the run of a 19th-century magazine the historian’s life ...”