“... in the middle of The End, the sixth and last volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s titanic work of self-description. At around page 482, the book swerves away from scenes of family and social life, and plunges, like a car crashing through a safety barrier, into a prolonged reflection on Adolf Hitler. For 360 pages Knausgaard discusses Hitler’s youthful ...”

“... if you prefer that option, it’s easy to know what to vote: Conservative. Anything else would be self-defeating. But if you want the alternative, it’s harder to know what to do, because in some places, especially where the Lib Dems have the best chance of defeating the Tories, a Labour vote would be self-defeating. So we ...”

“... saw how the pope’s death unravelled the once fearsome duke, who was ‘carried away by that bold self-confidence of his’, ranting and raving with ‘words full of poison and anger’. His state was lost. Machiavelli reflected in The Prince that Cesare had ‘acquired his state with the Fortuna of his father and lost it with the same, though he had taken ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a golden age that offered a ‘fortunate generation an amplitude of life, a public stage, a robust self-assurance, and a verve, elegance and grace both in mode of life and mode of expression’ interrupted by Lawrence Stone remarking that the ‘malice and hatred’ of a medieval village was matched only by an Oxford common room or Eugen Weber saying that this ...”

“... and 6 or 7 per cent of the workforce. Perhaps there are still Brexiters who think that being a self-serving annex outside the union – leaning in, like Switzerland, or a member of the EEA, like Norway – would see off EU migration. But even if their absolute intakes are lower, Switzerland and Norway have higher numbers of EU immigrants per head of ...”

“... media is becoming more and more comprehensive. What is left over, that ownership does not ensure, self-censorship increasingly neuters. The Gleichschaltung of parliament and political parties is, if anything, even more impressive. The presidential party, United Russia, and its assorted allies, with no more specific programme than unconditional support for ...”

“... evade not only the public horrors they seem faintly to shadow, but more private intensities of self-contemplation: they work, in short, as ritual games and puzzles, effective by their exclusions – their interesting mix of violence and nullity the opium, perhaps, of the English rectory and manor-house during the troubled inter-war period. With an ...”

“... embarrassing transgressions. In Klimt’s protégé Egon Schiele this ambivalence disappears. His self-portrait with Klimt of 1912 is the closest thing here to a great picture. The figures, both wearing smocks, stand close together – a blue smock belonging to Klimt can be seen in the exhibition. There is no island of safety isolating the fiercely drawn ...”

“... like the ‘dignified severity’ of Ozu’s films. He was probably thinking of their austere, self-denying style; but the contents of the films are severely limited too. The characters are not tiresome, though, because the internal spaces of their limited worlds are so vast, and so unforgettably delineated. Consider a famous scene from Early Summer ...”

“... then the fearful and subservient Arab minority that amounted to some 200,000 has recovered its self-esteem. A second and third generation has grown up, and today the Arab population is 1.5 million. But the attitude towards it of the Jewish right has not changed for the better. On the contrary. In the bakery that is the Knesset (the Hebrew word for ...”

“... oozing arm ending in a vast crab claw, and become an outcast. Without ceasing to be the blinkered, self-admiring fellow he always was, he has decided he doesn’t want to be the mere material of his compatriots’ medical and military experiments. One of the finer touches in this (fortunately) none too serious plot is that the aliens have weapons of tremendous ...”

“... something else. In Cornwall he came across the work of Alfred Wallis, a local fisherman turned self-taught painter: on the way back from Porthmeor Beach we passed an open door in Back Road West and through it saw some paintings of ships and houses on odd pieces of paper and cardboard nailed up all over the wall, with particularly large nails through the ...”

“... I just submitted my opening paragraph for analysis. It gets low scores for ‘self-references’, ‘social words’ and ‘positive emotions’, and high scores for ‘negative emotions’, ‘overall cognitive words’, articles and ‘big words’. Which seems quite accurate, and perversely gratifying (though ‘big words’ aren’t ...”