“... his influence inside the Beltway in the mid-1950s, after he began exhorting Americans to pursue ‘self-perfection’ and ‘spiritual distinction’ instead of exporting freedom and democracy to the rest of the world. But for the innumerable think-tank experts and ambitious academics and columnists who long to leave a mark on history, Kennan’s telegram ...”

“... as a counter-charm. The pattern of the major announcement, the dilatory follow-up and the tardy self-defence has shown an alarming consistency in his administration. Obama ordered the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay as the first act of his presidency. Eight months later, Guantánamo remains open and unsolved, the date of its closing has been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was the war that was Spanish, not the poetic response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... published in 1981 as Too Late to Turn Back, Paul Theroux describes her as ‘modest and a bit self-mocking’. At one point she recounts her attempts to tell a rural Liberian schoolteacher about her home town: ‘The London I had described of crowds, and hurrying motor vehicles, noise and underground trains, that was terrifying. It all sounded ...”

“... today, a laboriousness directly proportional to the spontaneity of the original event. The self-appointed memorialist has first to describe the scenario, the players and the action before he can actually tell the joke, which after such a build-up is inevitably a damp squib. Ion is quite happy to spend a couple of pages explaining the context for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... worldview, and about the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by the outside world’s interest in some ‘damn nasty Rasta’, all ‘ganja smell and frowsy arm’, as an angry mother puts it. Other characters do impressions of foreign music-business types ...”

“... to Mozart. He disapproved of boxing, guns and Wagner. Endowed with porch-front charm, he was self-conscious about his ‘girl’s mouth’ and his ‘inordinate desire to look nice’ when posing for photographs. His success as a mounted officer in the US army in France during the First World War was his only experience of the wider world and became a ...”

“... by EC Comics’ crime and horror output. Publishers responded with a Hays Code-style programme of self-censorship. EC closed all its titles except Mad magazine, and American comics became a little blander, until, in his own telling, Stan Lee came along and shook things up.Lee – the writer-editor who supervised the renaissance at Marvel Comics in the early ...”

“... fuel extraction have shifted tactics. Climate denialism in the 1990s was an overt and clearly self-interested lie, a conspiracy against science; the emphasis today is on broad-based movements that aggressively defend the fossil fuel way of life. Even with considerable funding from business, the big lie became hard to uphold; Exxon and BP now acknowledge ...”