“... understand the meaning of this rock; besides, what is this feeling of calm based on – on health, self-assurance, individual personality? I: on the emphasis on God. He (immediately changing his tone): well, that’s a different matter. Prokofiev now not only embraced ‘the new simplicity’ but also showed complete readiness to use Soviet subject matter and ...”

“... by all accounts a charismatic figure, but in the 1970s, at the height of his messianic Maoism, his self-belief had begun to evaporate. His life hadn’t quite worked out the way he might once have hoped, and in what turned out to be his final years he backed away from almost every position he had formerly held, even rewriting his early and most difficult ...”

“... advancement’. Sometimes even at the expense of his fellow officers: his famous – and much self-publicised – ‘great escape’ from the Boers in Pretoria in December 1899 left two comrades behind, fuming. He was quite brazen about this, which earned him little love among his fellow soldiers, or among his (very) senior officers, especially when – a ...”

“... that the rules didn’t apply,’ but he doesn’t go here. In Ulysses, Molly Bloom’s euphoric self-affirmation is too lyrical, Gerty MacDowell’s allusions to menstruation too seemly and quaint. McBride has said that her aim is ‘to make language cope with and more fully describe that part of life that is destroyed once it begins to get put into ...”

“... uplifting conclusion. She had it all worked out: Lovelace, ‘overwhelmed with grief, remorse, and self condemnation’, would fall into a ‘dangerous fever’ and be attended by Clarissa on his deathbed; charitably, she would agree to his dying wish to have their hands joined in marriage; invigorated by the promise of her affections, he would make a full ...”

“... the conventional narrative that is altogether more fascinating, not least in the way it omits any self-congratulation about human achievement. His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on ...”

“... reckon with. In an elegantly succinct chapter on the films, Arsenjuk anatomises their dialectical self-division between an ‘epic-heroic’ and a ‘theatrical-grotesque’ mode: on one hand, the epochal pathos and ecstasy of the dictatorship of the proletariat; on the other, a wily guerrilla tactic of explosion, caricature and Grand Guignol. Further ...”

“... deplored the Soviet regime and wanted all its dirty secrets exposed, his approach had none of the self-involvement of (say) Alain Besançon, the humourless righteousness of Richard Pipes or Leonard Schapiro’s cold disdain. There was a jokey, blokey aspect to Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an ...”

“... that this reveals – in the face of misadventures that would have sunk most such zealous self-promoters – would alone merit a careful investigation of how Alcibiades worked his magic. The number of those seemingly taken in by him, beginning with Thucydides and including various modern scholars and writers, makes an impressive list. The best place ...”

“... something of an orthodoxy in these circles that our behaviour is rarely governed by rational self-interest, but is swayed by norms, habits, instincts and emotions. Yet when such irrational forces, combined with techniques of psychological experimentation and influence of the sort used by nudgers on social media platforms, disrupted the democratic arena ...”

“... Statistics. Jobs are characterised according to their employment relations. Employers, the self-employed and employees are differentiated, with the last (and much the largest) group subdivided according to contractual status. Zero-hours contracts are an extreme case of the commodification of labour already implicit in working for a wage; salaried ...”

“... wars shows that although these weapons may not provide a decisive edge in combat they excel in self-advertisement, projecting an image of all-seeing omnipotence. Drones induce terror in civilian populations and healthy profits for manufacturers. The spell persists even when they are unarmed. Protesters in Minneapolis on the morning of 29 May, three days ...”

“... and he was 34. The local church recorded their deaths as ‘Mord und Selbstmord’ – murder and self-murder.Their graves, by the edge of the lake, are now a tourist attraction, enhanced by an immersive audio experience inviting visitors to contemplate the many unknowns that surround their last days. Depending on your degree of cynicism, their relationship ...”

“... dozens of insurrections have been launched, for the most part by ethnic minority groups seeking self-determination and later autonomy within a federal system. Until now, these conflicts have largely been confined to the seven ‘ethnic states’ on the country’s western, northern and eastern/southeastern borders. Now, PDFs are striking at the Bamar ...”

“... test to see which would win out when her personal convictions came into conflict with Scotland’s self-determination, that was it.Forbes’s conservative supporters seem to think that she should be given a Get Out of Jail Free card: it’s not her fault, it’s her faith and that of her community. Underlying this is a theological ‘blackboxing’, as if ...”