“... steaming towards Gallipoli – and had a lot to do with Brooke’s apotheosis as a poster-boy for self-sacrifice: Churchill’s threnody on his ‘classic symmetry of mind and body’ etc. As both Georgian and civil servant, Marsh had no problem with those who, as the New Statesman soon put it, pictured Brooke as a ‘blend of General Gordon and Lord ...”

“... and the rest’, but a means by which Iran could itself become Western and restore national self-respect. Britain, he noted, had ‘assumed world leadership in nuclear power production’ while ‘America’s long-range nuclear submarines roam the seven seas.’ Iran would once again be great like them. In March 1974, Iran and France struck a deal for ...”

“... and Ireland in 1800, the north-eastern counties, with their Protestant majority, became the most self-consciously British region of the United Kingdom. By the same token, Britishness of the Ulster kind – Orange parades and kerbsides painted red, white and blue – seems demonstrative and stridently un-British. To the summer visitor from Britain who pulls ...”

“... The grandson of an Anglesey sheep farmer, Jones was never exactly poor: his father was a real self-made man, a brilliant mathematician who rose from charity school in Llanfechell to become vice-president of the Royal Society (introducing ‘pi’ in its modern meaning along the way). But he died before his son’s third birthday, and Jones started life ...”

“... parliament, of which he had a very low opinion – but in a life so devoted to grandiloquent self-promotion there was little room for irony. He was 34 years old, and the world was at this point rather less interested in him than he imagined. Admiration of Il Vate (The Bard), as he would come to be called, was and remains an essentially Italian ...”

“... is a heavy load, or ‘noyous for to carye’, as the garrulous English eagle complains. That self-effacing joke is typical of Chaucer, and it isn’t the only time he remarks on his chubbiness, but it may also express a kind of phonic national modesty. Italian is an easier language in which to fly than English. It has a higher frequency of liquid ...”

“... from which important poetry proceeds.’ It was the work of Edward Thomas, like Spencer a profound self-doubter, that suggested how he might move away from the urgent, gnomic compressions of Wystan the Wunderkind. ‘In what sense am I joining in?’ he asks in the opening poem of Aegean Islands, ‘Allotments: April’; it is Spencer’s sense of being at an ...”

“... hegemony go hand in hand with something much more mundane: a tendency among their leaders to seek self-enrichment. Authoritarianism goes hand in hand with kleptocracy (a term coined by the Polish-British sociologist Stanislav Andreski in the late 1960s). The straightforward explanation is that the absence of legal and political constraints makes ...”

“... by Rembrandt or Goya or Manet or Degas, you can trace their changing intentions. For instance, a self-portrait made by Degas when he was 23 began as a light etch, with fine, spaced-out cross-hatching. Later, it became richer – the lines dense and black – yet remained a faint idea of a self: the hands unfinished, the ...”

“... version of Dan Leno: he does songs, he falls on his arse, he has trouble with machines, with self-worth, and he goes in for disguises, catchphrases, patter and multiple personalities. The old comics were human, of course, but the startling thing about the newer television cartoon characters is that they often appear more human than real people, more ...”

“... fundamental national rights of the Palestinian people. The document could not advance Palestinian self-determination, Said maintained, because self-determination entails freedom, sovereignty and equality.In my article I put the case for the Accord. It was obvious that the document fell a long way short of the Palestinian ...”

“... King School in Akron, Ohio, in June 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous has grown into the largest secular self-help organisation in the Western world. With its ten million members, it’s bigger than the Freemasons, the Rotarians, the TUC, the White Aryan Resistance, the Samaritans, the KKK, the Women’s Institute and – in terms of weekly attendance – the Church ...”

“... been invested with some of the Left’s more romantic aspirations. There is probably an element of self-delusion in this. Migrants are heroes of the Left only in the host country, not in the nations from which they come; and if you call them settlers instead, they immediately appear in a rather different light. Nevertheless, migration remains significant for ...”

“... sees a role for a charismatic Head, at least in a school’s popular reputation and its own self-imaging. But outside factors beyond any Head’s control, as well as sheer economics, are almost always more significant in ensuring that a school thrives. More often than not, periods of apparent decline at Harrow, measured crudely by pupil ...”

“... its maximum gestural impact.When he slipped away from England and his first wife in 1898, for a self-appointed exile in Dieppe, Paris and Venice, Sickert left behind a reputation as foremost apostle to the ‘genius’, he whose ‘lightest utterance is inspired’, the ‘immortal’, London’s ‘living Old Master’. Whistler was his first point of ...”