“... the Soviet Union should contain a clause allowing all nations in the union the right to national self-determination, i.e. the right to secede.The Bolsheviks agreed soon after taking power that Finland, Poland and Ukraine should be granted independence. They knew that Ukraine was different, that its peculiar national texture (immigrant Russian proletariat and ...”

“... language in attacking corruption, luxury and ostentation. ‘Well before the Great Reform Act, the self-made man had already donned a new image,’ Kuchta asserts. Men became even more serious and their clothing even simpler, winning admiration from such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who admired this English ‘studied plainness’ as a manifestation of innate ...”

“... have made reassuring gestures. George Bush and Condoleezza Rice have backed Israel’s right to ‘self-defence’ and blamed Hizbullah’s very existence for the current violence. Meanwhile Tony Blair – in an ironic reversal of the Blair Doctrine, which calls for intervention for humanitarian reasons – has called for more UN peacekeepers to be deployed in ...”

“... houses. When corruption hits the rich the poor soon join in. I despise those women who talk self-control while they’re burning hot on the inside. Aphrodite! how can such a wife look into her husband’s face without fear? What if the darkness, her accomplice – what if the very rooms of her house began to speak? For me now, ladies, death is the ...”

“... Mrs Queen, recounts the time he spent with the Prince Philip cult in the village of Yaohnanen.* A self-proclaimed Philip fan since childhood, Baylis doesn’t shy away from highlighting the obvious oddity that Britain’s most famous racist should be worshipped on an island of black people. We ought to respect Tannese belief, Baylis says, but at the same time ...”

“... Muslims, even recognising a Tatar puppet government. The Bolsheviks soon shattered any hopes of self-determination. Under Soviet rule, the Tatars suffered forced collectivisation, mass arrests and famine; as elsewhere in Russia’s Muslim borderlands, Bolshevik cadres destroyed mosques, confiscated religious endowments and persecuted mullahs. In the autumn ...”

“... Wilkinson), apparently filming a television interview at home. He gives way to his younger self (Jude Law), who is staying at almost empty and not quite derelict Grand Budapest Hotel. He meets the owner, who turns out to be Zero, played in age by F. Murray Abraham. He has inherited the hotel from Monsieur Gustave who inherited from Tilda Swinton. Zero ...”

“... it to the fore. Höch also recognised just how much cultures invest in myths and ideologies of self. I can think of no more acute examination of this topic than the series of montages that she put together in 1924-30 and grouped under the title Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (From an Ethnographic Museum). To look at these constructions, each a remix of ...”

“... done them something of a favour. Observers with a sense of history have noted that the tabloids’ self-justification, advanced in the name of press freedom, mirrors that of the authoritarian state. The Sun columnist Jane Moore admonishes errant public figures: ‘If you don’t want your private life splashed all over the papers, then behave ...”

“... pragmatist; Tymoshenko, the imprisoned former prime minister of Ukraine, is emotional, self-dramatising, glamorous, Eva Perón in peasant braids. Her supporters have taken to holding up a picture of her head growing out of a field of wheat, a version of the blue (for sky) and yellow (for fields of grain) Ukrainian flag in which Tymoshenko’s face ...”

“... When he is about to die by plunging his short sword into his stomach, he attempts a brave bit of self-deprecation, the grim farewell with the light touch. ‘I have always envied Rufio his long arms,’ he says. A tight smile appears on his face, so we know he knows what the effect is supposed to be. The effect isn’t there though. He’s been whinging ...”

“... Chichester (until 9 February). ‘Colour Her Gone’ (1962) The paintings start with an oil self-portrait from 1955, when she was a 17-year-old just enrolled at Wimbledon School of Art. There, she attracted a lot of attention. When a male student sitting opposite her in the canteen asked her why she wore such bright red lipstick, she lunged ...”

“... from the stereotype that had become familiar – a threatening austerity relieved at times by a self-conscious cheerfulness. There seemed to loom from his talk that afternoon what were to be the qualities of his later ‘Age of’ books: a command of detail and of scope, of structure and of sweep. There were choice, past-piercing details like the one he was ...”

“... a year or two, solely by making certain adjustments (as he once explained to me) to his inner self.’ I remembered how Johannes learned ancient Greek, then classical Hebrew and Akkadian: a quick read through the grammar (not quite without teaching aids), then hours and hours and days and months and years reading through the extant texts, muttering ...”

“... election that would finally do for the Conservatives. It was a game Brown was sucked into by the self-confident tyros who surround him, but was played so elaborately and ham-fistedly that they were almost certain to lose. (Most people knew that nothing was more likely to unite the Tories than the prospect of an election.) In the first two or three months of ...”