“... were substantial and dignified, in accordance with the confidence and satisfaction with the self that marked the culture of the prosperous male animal at that time. The hero of a Tolstoy novel will enjoy his ‘fine, clean, well-ironed linen nightshirt’, his fine silk dressing-gown, and even his toilette. ‘Having refreshed his plump, white, muscular ...”

“... government should do. They quickly ramped up their testing capacity, educated the public about self-isolation, shut down large gatherings, restricted travel, increased hospital capacity. They have allocated 30 trillion won (£19 billion) to the response. They have confirmed 6593 cases, but only 42 deaths so far – though only 41 people have been declared ...”

“... into. Of course he wanted to put his personal stamp on US policy, and of course he offers up the self-justifications common among members of Trump’s cabinet, who have claimed at various times that they were working behind the scenes to save the country, or the party, or the presidency, from the president himself. During the first two years of Trump’s ...”

“... By the time the local surgeon arrived, he was dead. Born in Co. Longford in 1864, Wilson was a self-declared Irishman whose family had settled in the country during the conquests of the 17th century. He was a ‘political soldier’, in the words of the historian Keith Jeffery: an ardent advocate of Ulster Unionism who bitterly opposed any form of ...”

“... falls in love with Protestant man, nothing ends happily ever after – makes space for narrative self-consciousness. ‘This is going to end really badly, isn’t it?’ Cushla says to Michael, tipping a wink at what the reader must be thinking. And again: ‘We’re doomed. Apart from that we’re grand.’ The key question Trespasses asks itself, often ...”

“... the same way other animals invent shells or camouflage – as strategies of protection and self-concealment.Mona, first published in Spanish in 2019 (Oloixarac is Argentinian), looks at first to be simpler than her previous two books, but in fact it’s just as extravagant. It tells the story of Mona Tarrile-Byrne, a Peruvian writer studying at ...”

“... imagination, within which his characters, acting in the belief that they are distinctive, self-driven individuals, reveal themselves to be subject to internal and external forces over which they have little or no control. This moment-by-moment melding together of the characters’ isolation and self-seeking, on the ...”

“... Andrew Knight was riding high. Most people lost their arguments with him. The key weapon here is self-deprecation. Deedes’s account of Conrad Black is somewhat similar, although written before he knew that the FBI had seized all Black’s hard disks: Deedes, indeed, is a bit like Robert Graves’s Claudius, surviving every situation while more powerful ...”

“... This was one of the cases that proved to be the undoing of the well-known alienist and self-publicist George Man Burrows (who had quite a stock of delusions of his own, among them that he could smell madness and detect a ‘maniacal odour’). He was given a keelhauling in the press for his arrogance and disregard for the liberty of the ...”

“... of large numbers of atoms. Examples of emergence include the hardness of crystals, the self-organisation of vast numbers of atoms that we know as life, and even the most fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s laws of motion. Emergence is said to occur when a physical phenomenon arises as a result of organisation among any component ...”

“... was probably closer to a good general definition than most professional critics when he identified self-ignorance as the crucial Romantic trait: ‘Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who would have judged it? The critics!? The Romantics, who show so clearly that the song is very rarely the work, which is to say the thought of the singer, sung and ...”

“... someone who has versified the 150th anniversary of Rochdale’s Co-Operative Society – is its self-imposed length. It is one thing to write a numerically regular poem like the brilliant but brief ‘Ten Pence Story’ (ten-syllable lines distributed among ten stanzas – the sort of poetry mathematics of which Peter Reading, an admirer of Armitage’s ...”

“... language, the insistence on something unrecognisable to set against the natural turpitude of the self. In his early years in England, Eliot liked to sign himself metoikos (‘resident alien’) in letters to journals, and was still calling himself a ‘spirit unappeased and peregrine’ by the time we get to ‘Little Gidding’, as if plain old ...”

“... where restoration of the balance of power was the best that could be hoped for. The principle of self-determination would now at last be realised across Europe. This was not to be an improvised affair. The British delegation’s composition and logistics had been calculated well in advance and to the finest detail by the Permanent Under-Secretary of the ...”

“... impressing the boy with a sense of the importance of his new name and, consequently, his new self: ‘All that school year I felt as if I had been chosen, and although, as I also knew, such a belief in no way matched my uncertain status, I have held fast to it almost my whole life.’ He spends most of his life, however, in ignorance of his ‘real ...”