“... last serious film was F for Fake) or some sort of allegory of influence. Learning that you have a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator on your hands – ‘I have always liked stunts (and also, as you may have guessed, pranks, hoaxes, games)’ – is the literary equivalent of discovering that you have invited a kleptomaniac into your home. In fact the ...”

“... the centre of the brain, the pineal gland. A hundred years later, the physician, philosopher and self-declared ‘mechanical materialist’ Julien Offray de la Mettrie dismissed Descartes’s dualistic waystation in his manifesto L’Homme machine. He argued that mental processes were no more than manifestations of the workings of the brain, a heretical view ...”

“... a gentle landscape of lawns and sparkling streams, and yet its freedom is ‘fictitious’. ‘Self-dependent lordlings’ have been able to engross power and make laws that suit their own interests at the expense of the country as a whole, and have at the same time convinced the meanest peasant that he too is free: Pride in their port, defiance in their ...”

“... of power relations between an empire’s margins and its centre. For all his eloquence and self-consciousness, Prince’s would-be Leonardo da Vinci can’t help letting slip that he views his supposed patron as a ‘tyrant’. Nor can he obscure the fact that he is lamenting, in the most sophisticated terms, the humiliating paradoxes of his status as ...”

“... down there with those of Topeka, Kansas, Madison, Wisconsin and Baton Rouge, Louisiana: bigoted, self-dealing, stupidity to the power of anything-you-like, manifesting urgency and savoir faire only where it really doesn’t matter) into the next slump. ‘The future’s uncertain, and the end is always near,’ as the navy brat Jim Morrison sang (born in ...”

“... foreign clerics were only too pleased to work inside the royal fold, where their distinction was self-evident. It also gave grounds for the aggrandising notion that philosophers supplied kings with wisdom – as Aristotle had Alexander.The​ second half of the 15th century was dominated by Ripley, the canon of an Augustinian priory in Yorkshire, whose ...”

“... what is called the ‘default mode network’, the interconnected brain areas responsible for self-reflection and self-consciousness, thinking about past and future, and for regulating other cerebral processes. The DMN, Sheldrake says, keeps a kind of order: ‘a schoolteacher in a chaotic classroom’. In neural ...”

“... was transformed into a thriving metropolis by the discovery of the Glenn Pool oilfield nearby. The self-proclaimed Oil Capital of the World, where J. Paul Getty began the career that made him the world’s richest man, had seen its population grow 300 per cent over the previous decade, from 18,000 to 72,000 people. Around 10,000 residents were African ...”

“... to which immigrants were entitled.In 2002, the BNP’s first candidates included a pub landlord, a self-employed civil engineer and a woman who worked in a car-parts factory (‘people like you’). In 2019, the Ukip biographer turned right-populist advocate Matthew Goodwin identified the Brexit Party’s core vote in the European elections as the ...”

“... her own life, just as she vowed to be better than her mother, an artist whose main talent was for self-regard. Ursula, however, found being a good parent harder than being a good communist, and when she had to choose between the two, she invariably chose communism. Turbulence in the Weimar Republic, including the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, pushed ...”

“... more than the women for a day’s work; their solution was to pool their wages. ‘In their self-governing groups,’ Smith writes, ‘students could practise the complementary virtues of self-reliance and mutual support that had been held up to them as ideals since childhood but that eluded them in official ...”

“... Russians, might benefit, but he didn’t think it would do much for the Swiss, who were lousy ‘self-observers … or self-devourers, as their saying goes’. They needed prompting. Instead of the talking cure for his sanatorium patients, he opted for art therapy. He also spent years on a study of Swiss phallic ...”

“... such people began to threaten their previously undisputed position of authority. Their ideal was a self-sufficient landed estate, with flocks, cattle and arable land, farmed by nameless workers who got protection in time of war as a quid pro quo. But from the seventh century BCE onwards, colonialism, with the consequent expansion of trade and horizons, led to ...”

“... from various angles, doggedly, querulously, concedingly, mournfully, its grip blunted by Wood’s self-denying ordinance against naming any living art historian. Thus at the close of his survey, he conducts the reader down into a glum dark place. His dungeon is shot through, however, with mystery lights:The historians of the contemporary are devoted to art ...”

“... Abraham Lincoln​ , memorialised as a child of the frontier, self-made man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by events he could not control ...”