“... 10 per cent of surviving literature in ancient Greek, much of it memoir, pop philosophy or self-help.This means we can’t be sure how dangerous the Antonine sickness really was, how many lives it claimed or whether it affected rural areas as well as cities. We don’t even know when it ended. Galen mentions further waves after the initial crisis, and ...”

“... democratic leaders, almost without exception, have degrees from elite institutions – including self-styled populist ‘outsiders’ such as Donald Trump (University of Pennsylvania), J.D. Vance (Yale), Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford) and Marine Le Pen (Paris 2).The global populist​ wave has exposed the failure of meritocracy, whether democratic or ...”

“... brick like Being and Nothingness by 1943. Sartre and the Freudo-Marxist philosophers of the self were, like novelists, discursive thinkers, who needed the long process and materiality of writing in order to discover their own thoughts. Canguilhem’s observation that there was no existentialist equivalent of Cavaillès may be true, but if there had been ...”

“... the Kent coast – Thanet Earth is a virtuous producer.Thirty Thanet Earths could bring Britain to self-sufficiency in ‘salad’, but even if you regard that as a triumph, there are snags. For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For ...”

“... of his flak jacket as he rocks to and fro in the cold – he discusses the war in the tones of a self-consciously patriotic veteran, laconic, fatalistic, deadpan.His ostensible message is an appeal to Volodymyr Zelensky to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut to prevent further bloodshed. The city, he claims, is almost surrounded. The impact of this small claim ...”

“... available, prove him to be uncommonly astute about Vivienne’s plight but also surprisingly self-doubting. As for his correspondence with Vivienne herself, he is believed to have destroyed all but a few of her letters while the affair was going on; and very few of his letters to her have been found or made available – there are no ...”

“... at home, and even before the delegates at Kyoto sat down to the cheerful welcoming banquet, self-interest was noticeably darkening the doorway.Conventions are good business anywhere. As Japan’s leading tourist destination, Kyoto has ample accommodation and no heavy industry, but there were deeper reasons for the choice of venue. Japan loves the ...”

“... country’s cynical and systemically corrupt democracy, in which parliamentary power is held by a self-serving coalition of historical opponents, a grubby marriage of convenience between neoliberals and social democrats. But the rise of Georgescu and Simion, whose Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) has become a powerful force in parliament, has had the ...”

“... book went to press too long ago for Obama to get a mention; Jeb Bush’s absurd claim to be a ‘self-made man’ – ‘few batted an eye at that description’ – is set up to be knocked down, however. In the second half of Outliers, Gladwell makes some bolder and not always so persuasive claims about broader ethnic contexts: Korean pilots are more likely ...”

“... officer; the officer has been charged with ‘premeditated manslaughter’, but claims he acted in self-defence. The week that followed saw mass demonstrations culminating in a general strike, the occupation of universities throughout the country, the torching of public buildings, the firebombing of police stations and the destruction and pillaging of hundreds ...”

“... from a boy – it is easier for the viewer to share their space. You feel that they would be too self-absorbed to notice you. Christen Købke’s ‘Portrait of the Landscape Painter Frederik Sødring’ (1832) There are pictures in which rooms are something more than backdrops. In Danloux’s Baron de Besenval in His Salon de Compagnie, the ...”

“... that a real person?’ – absurd, it doesn’t go away. You examine the huge face of the Mueck self-portrait that was on show in the British Museum at the beginning of this year as you would your own in a magnifying mirror. You may be disgusted by the enlargement as Gulliver was by the huge girls of Brobdingnag: ‘their skins appeared so coarse and ...”

“... going on in the first and last quarter of the 17th century to cause those two noticeable blips of self-regard? Melancholy is virtually non-existent before 1570, but begins to rise and then falls until it drops off completely around 1625, about the time of the death of Dowland. It builds again to a great surge in 1650 (when, it says in Wikipedia, ‘the Age of ...”

“... represent himself as someone who could make things happen. His tone more often hovered between self-deprecatory (‘can’t seem to do any better at the moment’) and doleful (‘do you really mean you would slog up here to have lunch with me’). Although Concerning E.M. Forster was published earlier this year and he’d been working on it for some ...”

“... responses to dress and being dressed? Are the installations and definitions here hybrid routes to self-knowledge? When Phillips has it that ‘the words and the objects in the exhibition exhibit each other, show each other off,’ he seems also to be saying that the objects and definitions will educate us, not in facts, but in attending to the experience of ...”