“... the Italian Un grido lacerante – it is a naked book, a book of widow’s suffering, of clamorous self-deprecation. How bereft and without value she has felt since the death of il Maestro – which is how Banti’s alter ego narrator, Agnese, refers to her magisterial husband throughout the novel. (The English translation has her call him, somewhat less ...”

“... could go after a first flush of virtuosity to ensure that his poems were not some elegant form of self-congratulation: there was always another step worth taking away from the well-turned ornament. ‘Memory’ is undated. It may have been written before the ‘Last Poems’ of 1872, sometimes known as ‘New Poems’ or ‘Songs’, but this is where it has ...”

“... was Kimbanguism, an Africanised Christianity that swept Congo in the 1920s. Simon Kimbangu was a self-styled prophet at a time when it seemed that only a saviour could deliver the Congolese from oppression. Born in 1889, he attracted a following as a young man by performing miracles; an elderly Kimbanguist told Van Reybrouck that Kimbangu had made his ...”

“... enlightening too, if not always in the advertised way. Margot Tennant had always possessed the self-confidence and judgmental sweep of someone born to great wealth and social prominence. Her family were pioneers of chemical bleaching. The Tennant plant outside Glasgow was the largest chemical works in the world at the time, and its towering chimney was a ...”

“... from its level four and a half minutes earlier. The market had entered a potentially catastrophic self-feeding downward spiral. Fortunately, though, the electronic trading platform on which these index futures were being bought and sold – the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s Globex system – is programmed to detect just such a spiral. Its ‘Stop Logic ...”

“... minds. To start with, certainly, Arthur has the advantage, his suggestibility perhaps muffled by a self-absorption approaching autism: when everyone else is convinced that the air-conditioning has broken down, and that the heat is unbearable, he consults only his internal thermostat. When Lindemann circles closer, Arthur continues to track his ...”

“... Red River qualifies its epic mode by imputing it to Dunson’s – or to Texan, or to American – self-aggrandisement. The ending aside, the film achieves an epic grandeur unsurpassed among Westerns. Red River is a capitalist epic. The railroad, which in populist Westerns is usually the enemy, the corporation dispossessing the farmers, is in Red River a ...”

“... and since access to the elite means access to wealth, the cycle of elite formation is essentially self-sustaining and closed to outsiders. This is scarcely news. It is known now and it was known 50 years ago, but there has never been a serious will to do anything about it. The year of the Butler Education Act, 1944, also saw the publication of the Fleming ...”

“... averts its eyes from the past or licks its wounds. Both attitudes translate into paralysing self-consciousness. Once again, the realities on the ground – the ‘Africa of the Africans’ – do not count for much. French public opinion, which with rare exceptions did not object to the neo-colonialism of the trente glorieuses, is once again ...”

“... Her subsequent publications are not obviously driven by any impulse to theological self-definition, though they recurrently strike what might sound like a Unitarian note of principled brightness: McCarthy describes her as having a ‘good-humoured hopefulness’, which seems right. In 1774, against her father’s wishes, she married Rochemont ...”

“... recorded Eurozone negotiations on a smartphone – all of this, on a charitable reading, was not self-promotion but an attempt to put pressure on the Eurogroup by influencing a European public which, alas, at this stage in its linguistic and cultural fragmentation, simply doesn’t exist. Varoufakis’s style was a break with the EU’s usual method of ...”

“... Israeli-Palestinian accommodation, had the occupying power intended to allow the occupied genuine self-rule with able, honest people’. This is wishful thinking. Those ‘able, honest people’ who talked to the Israelis didn’t hold much sway with the majority of Palestinians and it seems likely that they would have been stripped of authority in any real ...”

“... of Joan of Arc came into focus, the depressive national mood was countered, for my childhood self, by a vision of gallantry under pressure, of a young woman’s heroism. The convent itself stood on the rue Edith Cavell, named after another heroine of the same selfless, courageous mould: Cavell (born 1865) worked as a nurse, a teacher and a spy in Belgium ...”

“... have been the good guys, Haneke makes unappealing and incapable of fighting back, their gated self-satisfaction turning into equally gated self-pity, so that our identification with them is held in check – though it is at the ready, as the audience reaction to the wife’s retaliation demonstrates. Haneke erases that ...”

“... school I went to from 1946 until 1952, as a grammar school though I suppose it was. It wasn’t so self-conscious and pleased with itself as most of the schools that feature and the range of ability for which it catered seems in retrospect so wide it might well have been a comprehensive school before its time. Nor was it in the least bit snobbish as so many of ...”