“... libel cases and the older methods of telephoned menaces and close news management by the Kremlin. Self-censorship returned. As one media-watcher told Jack, ‘we thought that the guard inside each journalist’s head had left his post and gone away. Now we have found out that he was just asleep and is waking up.’ The rest of the world is increasingly unsure ...”

“... and political engagement. As Zubok acknowledges, their Soviet schooling propagated ‘ideals of self-cultivation and self-improvement, and the pervasive cult of high culture … once intrinsic to the ethos of the Russian intelligentsia’; as a result, it produced young people ‘with intellectual curiosity, artistic ...”

“... the years of their relationship, his ego and ideology were buoyed up by Claretta, whose lack of self-doubt, to judge from the written record, was greater even than his. As love affairs go, theirs was very well documented. In addition to 318 letters which Mussolini wrote to her between 1943 and 1945 alone, Claretta left behind a vast correspondence and ...”

“... who had won a scholarship to read history at Trinity, fitted naturally into this highly-strung, self-consciously aesthetic milieu. He got round the rule forbidding pianos in students’ rooms by buying an antique dulcitone, an instrument undreamed of by the college authorities, overspent his generous allowance on ‘an impractically huge Breton oak ...”

“... quite neatly. Besteiro was the dreamy idiot. Casado, who pulled him into the conspiracy, was the self-dramatising, self-obsessed moron. Paul Preston, author of The Last Days of the Spanish Republic, hits hard from his first page. ‘This is the story of an avoidable humanitarian tragedy that cost many thousands of lives ...”

“... rhythmic construction and even managed to bite the masses in the ear with it.’ Mitchell, who was self-taught – a baritone ukulele first, then the guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction record – invented everything about her music, including how to tune the guitar. ‘From the beginning of the process of writing, she’s building a canvas as well as she is ...”

“... UK support Saudi Arabia would no longer be able to prosecute its war. MBS will be hoping that the self-interest of the British government and British arms manufacturers – helped along by Saudi-funded lobbying and soothing noises from his supporters in the press – will continue to trump all legal arguments. The other event, of course, was the killing of ...”

“... to survive. By the second season, Winter, the algorithm – look at something outside one’s self, try to follow the thread – begins to weaken for Knausgaard. Has he exhausted the strategy? One late entry, ‘Habits’, obliquely questions the whole project. The speaker seems to fear he has become too good at the formula; he also seems to want to see ...”

“... terms with university scholars like Cranmer, a don to his fingertips. But Cromwell never lost the self-containment and self-reliance of the autodidact. He was a man of the world, a pragmatist whose preoccupations were with the possible; it just so happened that for Cromwell the scope of possibility was so much greater than ...”

“... which meant ‘creating not just an economic border but increasingly a culture of national self-supply’. ‘The British nation’, in other words, now implied a society committed to protectionism, to exporting (‘Export or Die’ was the slogan) at the cost of sharply reduced imports, and to a universal welfare state that existed within a culture of ...”

“... advice (‘Get that grand old strain of Yankee Doodle/In your noodle’) and sailed away from self-doubt and disappointment. Every live wire goes dead without connections; and Porter latched onto his at the Ritz in Paris in January 1918 when he met the beautiful, patrician American divorcée Linda Lee Thomas at a breakfast marriage reception. Porter was ...”

“... having her opinions heard, but without the responsibility of an actual job.A private diary is a self-portrait, the speech delivered to the bathroom mirror, which does not always play so well outside. Swire has a Pooterish tendency to record her own best remarks and other people’s comments about her in a way that doesn’t always strike the reader as it ...”

“... documentation when National Insurance records were deemed insufficient, the loss of work and of self-respect, the sense of betrayal, the humiliating and dehumanising nature of it all. For Hubert Howard, who came to England when he was three and never left, ‘It has been a struggle and it’s destroyed my life.’ Paulette Wilson, who has been in England ...”

“... his studies, not least because his uncle had given him some writing to do (there’s a hint of self-justification here, as if he worries that Tacitus will suspect him of cowardice, or – almost as bad – a lack of curiosity). As the Elder Pliny was waiting to embark, he received a message from the wife of a friend who was trapped below the volcano, and ...”

“... Teddy Roosevelt wrote, ‘have upset their governments, have denied them the right of self-determination, and have made democracy within their limits not merely unsafe but non-existent.’ Wilson was, he thought, only making the world safe for hypocrisy. But despite Wilson’s readiness to treat the Americas as a privileged sphere for US ...”