“... to take real steps towards disarmament. Otherwise, non-nuclear states will regard their demands as self-serving and hypocritical – reason enough to think about creating an arsenal of their own. It isn’t hard to guess how the Russians, the Chinese and other nuclear powers reacted to the US’s announcement. The Obama administration, which in public supports ...”

“... prince felt utterly useless: ‘fifty years, life therefore behind me, idle observer in daily self-denial, discipline practised over a lifetime, condemned passively to while away the final years.’ On 9 March 1888, two weeks before his 91st birthday, William I, German Emperor and King of Prussia finally died and Frederick III ascended the throne, but he ...”

“... emperor Menelik II and his queen Taytu Betul, who thanks to their good looks and skill at self-promotion were already familiar figures on the world stage. Diplomats, arms dealers, journalists and the plain curious from Europe and the US hurried to ingratiate themselves with the victors in the hope of securing lucrative contracts. Westerners sought to ...”

“... in those gleaming cabinets. So many of them have become iconic that they now wear a classical, self-important air. Hirst taught us to look at cows’ heads weltering in their own blood and buzzing with flies (A Thousand Years), and we have learned to do this too well, without flinching. The Tate show is full of young children with clipboards and question ...”

“... averred to an exasperated faculty superior that he was an ‘anarchist’. Of course, not a few self-regarding Oxbridge dons see themselves as anarchists on the basis of some occasional truculence on a college gardens committee. Cobb was not a political animal but an inveterate dissident and satirist, which makes it possible to explain his writing so often ...”

“... didn’t. The 96 per cent don’t think in one mind about anything. Many of the 47 per cent will self-identify with the 53 per cent. Many of the 53 per cent will self-identify with the 47 per cent. Politics is a messy business. And come election time, the candidate who manages to assemble a coalition of even 50.5 per cent ...”

“... as Roman institutions had been successfully grafted onto the ‘rude’ Teutonic mark, so British self-government could be bonded with its analogue, the Indian panchayat. This would provide a ‘substratum’ for representative democracy. The British rulers should not fear local bodies of this sort, he added. The French Revolution and the recent Paris Commune ...”

“... much on transmitting skills and not enough on teaching facts. The running here has been made by a self-appointed pressure group calling itself Better History, formed in 2006 to advise the Conservative shadow education team. The group, which is led by Seán Lang, a former schoolteacher, seems to have supplied Gove with many of his ideas – chief among them ...”

“... the local press. Nothing was more likely to produce a manic reaction than the release of a genuine self-confessed Soviet spy from jail. As in cities under wartime bombardment, the combination of real danger and declared enemy ferocity entrenched the determination of the besieged garrison of Communist and philo-Communists. In Britain it certainly prevented any ...”

“... the post-romantic modernism of the 1920s, is often explicitly anti-romantic: he is a mocker and self-parodist, a tease, someone whose music – especially the chamber music – is filled with ‘wrong notes’ and intentional violations of a listener’s expectations. One of his most moving works, the Eighth Quartet, written on a visit to Dresden in 1960 ...”

“... Wyatt – a man so steeped in horse-lore that the animals run through his poetry (‘I my self be bridilled of my mynde’) – galloped on through the night and the rain. It should have been his moment of glory. As a poet Wyatt fulfilled the central requirement for the ideal advocate. Ambassadors of the period were almost all ‘courtly makers’ of ...”

“... faltered. ‘One will never feel the same again. I talk & laugh & listen but … one’s real self dies.’ She had lost more than a husband, she had lost her occupation. In the 1930s she described herself as an ‘anti-feminist’ believing that jobs should go to men and writing airily to her old friend D’Arcy Osborne that ‘women can be idle quite ...”

“... of Dance of the Happy Shades would be modulated into something easier to call sorrowful, or self-pitying. ‘An Ounce of Cure’ introduces the ‘years later’-type coda: on the last page, a woman, now ‘married several years’, returns home for a funeral and catches sight of a high school crush. Back then, he reminded her of Mr Darcy, and his ...”

“... particular fondness for places he mucked up as president,’ Katz writes. Amid the flashbulbs and self-congratulation at the conference, Katz noticed other portents. The Haitian government’s plan for reconstruction read as if it had been ghostwritten by the donors. It emphasised private enterprise, paid scant attention to housing for the 1.5 million people ...”

“... have ever encountered, and a thrilling display of how paint conveys ideas, time, place, building a self-contained world at once absorbing and convincing in its relation to lived experience. So, more or less (I have tinkered with it only a bit), began Jackie Wullschlager’s review of the Lowry exhibition (until 20 October) in the Financial Times. I was ...”