“... Wilson, though hardly a firebrand, issued the principles of a new world order of which national self-determination would be a key component. The following January, an assembly of Irish MPs, elected to Westminster on the abstentionist ticket, met in Dublin to found the second Irish Republic; the first had been proclaimed by the leaders of the Rising in ...”

“... and early death. In keeping with long-established (but soon to be much reduced) traditions of self-improvement, he educated himself in some of the larger questions of demography and policy that underlay the figures which were his daily business, and in his early thirties began to publish articles and books on these topics. The Second World War opened up ...”

“... mature women of vaguely Eastern European origin who used sex to drain men of money, status and self-esteem before discarding them – and then to the more youthful flappers, with their casual disregard for social and moral convention. In 1926 MGM cast the unequivocally European Garbo in two vamp films, Torrent and The Temptress. In both, she sinks her ...”

“... solitary crossing of the desert, the painful abandonment of the ‘seduction theory’, the heroic self-analysis, the tearing away from the transference on Wilhelm Fliess, the stoicism in the face of his colleagues’ attacks.It is a nice story, but we now know it to be nothing but a vast ‘legend’ (Henri Ellenberger). One after another, historians of ...”

“... an unusually reflective activist, and defeat seems only to have sharpened his mind. He writes with self-deprecating, rueful wit about what some might view as his quixotic involvement with Israel’s anti-Zionist left. History hasn’t followed Matzpen’s script for permanent revolution in the Middle East, and Warschawski, chastened by events, writes that ...”

“... this poem as remarkably unkind and accusatory. How does the poet know so much about Margaret’s self-concern? Is he right about her? Do we all have to feel the way Margaret is said to? But recently I have come to hear the stress differently. It is not that Margaret is mourning only for herself; just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else she may be ...”

“... What would have been an invaluable record of Charles Burney’s indefatigable efforts at self-advancement was replaced by her Memoirs of Dr Burney (1832), a canonisation of him and a celebration of her own literary career. (‘Fanny’s last novel’, Roger Lonsdale called it in his biography of Charles Burney.) Yet she recovered and left to us a ...”

“... jaw right to the skull. He tried to maintain contact not just with H.D. but also with his prewar self. To an American patron, the Reverend Charles Bubb, whose small press would publish books by Aldington and H.D., he wrote in 1917 that ‘until I joined the army I had lived with dreams, books and love – the shock of change was too abrupt and I still feel ...”

“... 1967 her older sister confirmed that the handwriting could have been hers). It is a Pooterish, self-pitying document, whose author laments her failure to win the lottery (‘So I am not going to be rich after all’). Her other regrets include Hitler’s not giving her a dachshund for her birthday and his neglect of her for months at a time (‘So he has a ...”

“... Melville’s narrator. By 1855 in New York they were the third largest occupational group. Their self-esteem as their numbers grew was not shared: ‘Nothing about clerical labour was congenial to the way most Americans thought of work … At best, it seemed to reproduce things … the bodies of real workers were sinewy, tanned by the relentless sun, or ...”

“... be strong enough to walk unsupported for possibly a month in all’. Blue Nights, a more anxious, self-questioning book than The Year of Magical Thinking, is about fear, Didion’s and Quintana’s principally: fear of being abandoned, of time passing, of losing control, of dying; and about the memory of a time between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s when ...”

“... deferred. Christina Rossetti’s brother once wrote that she was ‘replete with the spirit of self-postponement’, and in that regard at least she resembled her more eminent male contemporary. For Tennyson’s lyrics are repeatedly, charismatically preoccupied by the idea of lives on hold, each moment of them informed by an unfocused sense of utter ...”

“... who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist and self-described ‘mercenary of emergency medicine’, he helped launch Médecins sans frontières in the early 1970s. He broadcast the plight of the Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, advised Mitterrand in the 1980s, roused public indignation over events ...”

“... They thought it all was experience.’ The letters show the moment by moment process of self-enlargement, of fiction taking over from reality, of Hemingway braiding himself a style first and then a history to match it. If his family mistook so much of what he wrote for experience, that’s because he set it up that way, signing himself ‘Old ...”

“... but not when he sticks to his mission, part of which is to persuade his audience that only self-deprecation and a lack of curiosity blind them to the fact that the roofscapes and skylines of Durham and Stralsund are the equals of Venice. Some of his favourite stomping grounds are those ‘places as far south as south of the Thames which feel – and ...”