“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Pennsylvania. She once told me in exasperation: “Husbands are not important!”’ Guest’s self-effacing pursuit of capital-I Imagination, after the models of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens and H.D., would cause her to be left behind as the age moved towards a model of political and feminist poetries. But her 500-page Collected Poems belongs ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... piece with the many assured judgments they make about Hamlet in the play with the most canonically self-doubting hero. Everyone, it seems, is more certain than Hamlet about what’s wrong with him. Nietzsche, though, uses Hamlet, as people tend to do, to make a larger point. ‘The Dionysian man,’ he writes, resembles Hamlet; both have once looked truly ...”

“... only direct fatality – at the centre of a modern ritual, a work of spectacular and dramatic self-portraiture. Lisa Tickner quotes one witness saying: ‘I should think all criticism must be hushed in the face of such devotion.’ Davison’s death had caught the imagination. The public mood was changing to sympathy for her cause. The First World War ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... very occasional use of the phrase ‘invisible hand’ – the now well-worn metaphor for the self-regulating capacity of the free market – was playful rather than integral to his message. The co-architect of New Labour, Gordon Brown, went a few steps further, attempting to rehabilitate Smith, not without some plausibility, as a proponent of ‘the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been recognised, is how I felt.’ There is recognition also, as well as perhaps some latent self-congratulation, in Homer’s admiration of the hippies: ‘living as they did, these kids were more radical critics of society than the antiwar or civil rights people getting so much attention in the newspapers … They had simply rejected the entire ...”