“... Chiang’s exotic appeal was reinforced by considerable mental agility and apparently boundless self-confidence. Eleanor Roosevelt found her ‘hard as steel’, and she wasn’t wrong: asked at a White House dinner in 1942 how strikers were dealt with in China, Meiling drew a fingernail across her throat. Her superior attitude flowed naturally from her ...”

“... made, whose preferences we say don’t track their ‘real interests’. Where we should think ‘self-determination’, we still think ‘save’. Grant wants​ to go back to an older politics. The problem with humanitarianism isn’t just that it provides a vehicle for displaced imperial ventures, or that it can go badly wrong. It’s that it misses the ...”

“... coercion and mobilisation, but buttressed by patriotism and aspirations to a socialist version of self-betterment. While most historians see both terror and civilisation as important to understanding the Soviet experience of the 1930s, they tend to spend their time investigating either one or the other. Schlögel is the first to attempt to knit them together ...”

“... Ledeneva describes as the ‘unwritten rules, double standards, multiple moralities and forms of self-deception played out in the field of informal politics’. Next door ran the humdrum affair of Plentyoffish Media Inc v. Plenty More LLP. But in Court 26 we were treated to a discussion on the meaning of the word krysha, which denotes political/mafia ...”

“... responded when she saw the plans. Over eight pages she dismissed the scheme as an alienating, self-consciously futuristic ‘Flash Gordon job’. She begged her father to build something instead that ‘expresses the best of the society in which you live, and at the same time your hopes for the betterment of this society’.Bronfman, keen to have his ...”

“... the nods to Kafka, Faulkner and Beckett don’t look stiff. In the caustic accounts of hikers’ self-indulgent inwardness, and of the way backpackers float their idylls on a sea of poverty, he gets at themes dramatised in his earlier novels with, this time, no stagey debates. Arctic Summer​ is, in many ways, a rewrite of In a Strange Room: the story of a ...”

“... raw – like a raw throat’. In her later years, she was ‘permanently convulsed with self-pity’. A friend of Thayer’s remembered Florence as seeming ‘rather to fear her brilliant son’, and for good reason, since his notes on her were quietly vicious: ‘remarkable my mother did not have whipped cream on her baked beans’. Thayer was at ...”

“... an equivalent response. Maybe most of us also underestimate the value saga-society put on self-control. There are several scenes in the saga where characters say nothing but betray their feelings by their nervous reactions. Taunted by his mother, Bergthora, into taking blood-revenge, Skarphedin says, pretending to make a joke of it: ‘Our old mother ...”

“... the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which since 1984 has been fighting for self-rule for the 15 million Turkish Kurds. Like Isis, the PKK combines fanatical ideological commitment with military expertise and experience gained in long years of guerrilla war. Marxist-Leninist in its original ideology, the PKK is run from the top and seeks ...”

“... as such. Even before the Harry Potter books were published with two sets of covers to fit the self-images of two overlapping readerships, Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer, marketed domestically as a children’s book, could be published in Italian translation as for adults. The Young Adult label has a faintly disparaging though illogical overtone (would ...”

“... the ideal training for becoming an Edwardian freedom fighter. She had only to turn her profound self-abnegation to a different end. The hunger strikes started in June 1909 with Marion Wallace Dunlop, an artist, throwing fried fish, bananas and hot milk out of the window of her cell. Asked what she would have for dinner, she replied: ‘My ...”

“... of Bosworth, Garrick and his wife Eva-Maria Veigel, the painting known as The Shrimp Girl, the self-portrait of Hogarth with his unfortunately named pug Trump – but to see all the portraits together is a revelation, and should establish Hogarth, in spite of his contempt for ‘phiz-mongers’, as a portraitist of equal brilliance to ...”

“... Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historically more credible heretic-burner bent on martyrdom. More’s self-flagellation and habitual wearing of a hair shirt now look less like the pure tokens of virtue they did to his hagiolaters. To the charge that More had an unnatural fondness for torture (when John Tewkesbury, a London leather merchant and Protestant, was ...”

“... did not accept that this fitted the Indian people in their current state for anything approaching self-government. After the Mutiny, with the enormous strengthening of the British regiments, India became an undisguised military dictatorship, and one which was in the end prohibitively expensive to maintain. Nor should we exaggerate the role played by ...”

“... about the alarming conjunction of consumerism, image-transmitting technology and the death-driven self, and the way it plays out in terrorist ‘spectaculars’ and private anomie – has turned into a roar, and his response has seemed to be governed by contradictory impulses. One is to embrace the role of a prophet, as he does in Cosmopolis (2003), a fiery ...”