“... masterfully disorienting 1928 sequence The Descent of Winter, written on shipboard, and focused on self-doubt in middle age: There are no perfect waves – Your writings are a sea full of misspellings and faulty sentences. Level. Troubled . . . This is the sadness of the sea – waves like words, all broken – a sameness of lifting and falling mood. A 1944 ...”

“... costumes, like my own drawings. There was something regressive about Kirby now – he’d become self-referential, the outsider artist decorating the walls of private rooms.The comics Karl and I actually relished in 1976 and 1977, if we were honest (and Karl was more honest than me), were The Defenders, Omega the Unknown and Howard the Duck, all written by a ...”

“... a Lawrentian sense that men and women live in different worlds; John displays, too, the paralysing self-consciousness that in Lawrence and elsewhere afflicts men who cannot be masculine. Fighting insomnia, John contemplates ‘some necessity he never got the hang of, or the feel of, the place of. One wants to ask a simple question, do I do it right, is it ...”

“... imagining what it would look like if a society with no laws were turned over to the free will of self-denominated geniuses. Well, someone has done that, except it isn’t a book or movie, it’s a video game. BioShock, which came out in 2007, was conceived by Ken Levine and developed by 2K Boston/2K Australia, and is set in an alternative-reality version of ...”

“... being in his predilections. Wouldn’t a mirror have done just as well? But maybe the risk of self-sabotage is part of what drove him on. Asquith, too, was aware that he might be ruined if his letters to Venetia fell into the wrong hands. He told Venetia he was ‘certain’ that she wouldn’t help any scurrilous biographers by passing on his ...”

“... aesthetic, sotto-voce style’, his ‘preference for backstage manoeuvring’, an ‘unfailing self-regard’ and the way ‘he quickly forms fixed opinions about people, sometimes based on scant evidence’ (no evidence was given for this opinion about Kushner’s opinions: no evidence and no source). ‘He also has a habit,’ unnamed sources were ...”

“... thinking; but the public wants instant gratification. Without constraints, democracies are bad at self-preservation. It’s for this reason that most central banks are kept formally independent of the elected branches of government; that way, monetary policy is preserved as the business of supposedly neutral technocrats. This is the common sense that emerged ...”

“... operatives abducted 12 men from a hotel in Abuja, the federal capital. All were members of the self-styled government of the Republic of Ambazonia, Africa’s latest secessionist movement in neighbouring Cameroon, and all were refugees in Nigeria, some of long standing, among them Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe, the would-be president of the aspiring ...”

“... he keeps sliding back into talking about race. One crucial chapter, on the concept of ‘racial self-interest’, argues that a pattern of white people moving out of mixed urban communities into whiter ones shows that people are more comfortable living with their own kind, and that this isn’t a problem because there is a difference ‘between love for ...”

“... It is here that H. sapiens’s narcissistic tendencies, our instinct to believe that we are self-evidently and in all respects a huge upgrade on our human relatives, can get in the way. However, a betting person, travelling back in time to around 100 ka to take a punt on which species of Homo might come out on top in the hominin games, might well have ...”

“... was at odds with the healthy desire of the Australians and Canadians – and the Irish – for self-government. It also imperilled Anglo-American co-operation. Balfour’s government collapsed in late 1905 and the Liberals returned to office, securing a large electoral majority in 1906. True to family tradition, Grey expressed repeated doubts about serving ...”

“... he got on famously with Honecker and an understanding grew between them that Ulbricht’s rigid self-certainty had become a liability. Ulbricht was finally evicted in 1971, but not before his prime minister, Willi Stoph, had met Brandt twice, at Erfurt (East) and Kassel (West), without first getting Soviet approval. A few years later, Brezhnev plunged the ...”

“... When it goes awry, when people lose and/or reject all positive referents in the real world for the self inside, we call them delusional, psychotic, mad. In order to count as sane, you don’t necessarily have to conform to the norms of the world, but you do have to be nonconformist in a generally acceptable way. One of the basic beliefs we all have, according ...”

“... the promotion and rewarding of correct speech. In recent years the German state, together with the self-designated ‘democratic parties’, has funded wholly or in part a variety of institutions devoted to state-compatible political education for state-compatible democracy. These include Correctiv, which now has a staff of sixty and the Amadeu Antonio ...”

“... tons of equipment, barely broke even). Crucial to their advancement was Michael Tretow, a young, self-taught studio whizz who engineered all of their hits. In 1972, after reading a book about Phil Spector he’d chanced on in a Stockholm bookshop, Tretow secretly overdubbed the backing track of ‘Ring Ring’, the band’s soon-to-be first hit, tweaking the ...”