“... called in the Roman army’s Vindolanda tablets – suffered a total collapse of cultural self-confidence in the post-Roman era, especially in the most Romanised and so least self-sufficient areas, and that they may have been ready to accept the language and lifestyle of their new competitors. Something like that ...”

“... Testament and a little of the New, they did not have Tyndale as a guide. He had never finished his self-appointed task, being judicially murdered in 1536 by the Holy Roman Emperor. The murder was carried out with the connivance of Henry VIII; a few years later, Henry was to pride himself on authorising an English Bible, which (with one of those ironies so ...”

“... superficiality of his age, but is unable to have any real feelings for anyone or anything: ‘His self was locked in a nutshell … outside were his shadows, dolls. He saw himself as almost autistic, imitating contact with the outside world, talking to others in false voices to fish out whatever he needed from the Moscow squall: books, sex, money, food, power ...”

“... Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had led IS since 2010, in a US raid in north-west Syria was celebrated in a self-glorifying speech by Donald Trump as proof that IS had been definitively destroyed. The claim had some substance: al-Baghdadi, who five years earlier had declared himself caliph in the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, was the most important surviving symbol of IS as ...”

“... was tragically limited, and though that seemed doubly enraging, it’s axiomatic. A degree of self-delusion may be essential in sexual acts that are so disproportionate, and a lack of empathy for the victim is key to every kind and style of sexual assault. Also, of course, some of the men weren’t sorry: it was too hard to be sorry when it seemed as ...”

“... returned from its Babylonian captivity in Avignon, Rome was a shadow of its ancient imperial self. Perhaps twenty thousand people lived in a city built for a million. Sheep grazed on the Forum, where the great dramas of the Republic had been staged, and on the hills, where warlords and emperors had built their palaces. The streets were no longer ...”

“... Fonda, say. Fonda acted once in Omaha with Marlon’s mother. Could Brando have been so calm, self-effacing and available to us as Fonda is in 12 Angry Men? Could he have played the chump in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve without angling for sympathy? There has always been a strain of American acting that is resolute, simple and content to trust a known ...”

“... libertinage and Catholic mysticism. Binet casts Sollers as a childishly boastful, histrionically self-involved buffoon who tirelessly spews either free-associative prose-poetry or monologues about, say, Americans’ amazing obliviousness to Derrida’s debt to his novel Numbers (1966), ‘which no one in New York or California has ever bothered to ...”

“... attempt to seize power in the ‘beer-hall putsch’ of November 1923 was an important part of its self-image in subsequent years. Hitler went to prison for leading the putsch, and the period following his release in 1924 was pivotal. Believing that Röhm’s continued advocacy of the violent seizure of power was counterproductive, and alienated by his close ...”

“... doused with contempt, as the US media declare that his line is dictated by murky commercial self-interest, political payback for help during his election campaign or even blackmail. Whatever Trump’s motives – and he clearly didn’t think carefully before adopting most of his policies – the argument for trying to have better relationships with ...”

“... But hoping for a rise in sea levels of just one or two feet by 2100 is starting to look a lot like self-delusion, and for those who have the luxury of choice, clinging to life at the waterline is increasingly an exercise in self-defeat. For politicians and the rich, who prosper from maintenance of the status quo, it is ...”

“... by herself and at her own pace. Perhaps because her huge early success precluded the need for self-promotion, she has, somewhat miraculously for a still youngish writer, never participated in the social media circus. The result is that she tends to arrive at positions that can surprise us, challenging received wisdom without ever lapsing into automatic ...”

“... a view of the boulevards. The painting is a record of friendship, of shared endeavour, mutualised self-belief. A few months later Bazille, who had enlisted as a Zouave when the war began, was killed in one of the several futile battles fought in the hope of breaking the Paris siege. He was 28. Renoir was conscripted and sent to the Pyrenees, where he got ...”

“... family, in 1927. His determining characteristic, it struck me, was the pride of the electively self-condemned. He lived and thrived on his difference, choosing to remain at an oblique angle to fashion, publishing a successful novel in Paris, receiving the benediction of Julio Cortázar, and then waiting almost thirty years before releasing another. Living ...”

“... she rejects the question. ‘She’s all sorts of woman,’ Jo says – and so is Jo. ‘My usual self is a very unusual self, Geoffrey Ingram, and don’t you forget it.’I can’t think of another play that gives such an unvarnished portrait of the exigencies of motherhood: of what mothers give and resent giving, of what ...”