“... after she arrived from Australia. She quarrelled with the community staff when they asked her to self-quarantine. The police were called and the following day her employer, Bayer China, sacked her; a few days later she was told to leave China and return to Australia. My neighbour didn’t want to risk his job by finding out whether the security guard was ...”

“... fought doggedly on the Spartan side, ‘precisely because Sparta favoured their oligarchic mode of self-government and was likely to be willing to help defend it,’ as Cartledge writes. After Sparta’s victory in 404, Thebes, along with Corinth, is said to have demanded the total destruction of Athens – both cities would have gained enormously from the ...”

“... emergence, but Otter makes clear that by the end of the 19th century food power was dispersed and self-generating, ‘an instrument of discipline and economic transformation’ in its own right. For this reason he doesn’t pay much attention to political (much less party) battles over particular pieces of legislation or regulation: the system requires them ...”

“... Covid-19 or not. I heard a proposal to give everyone a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machine for self-testing at home. Others embraced instrument-free nucleic acid detection, which replaces the complicated boiling and cooling of a PCR machine with a single reaction at 65°C. Since beeswax melts at the same temperature, the idea was that everyone could be ...”

“... to dwindle. By 1408 the campaign had degenerated into a guerrilla war, and by early 1409 the self-proclaimed Prince of Wales was a desperate and hunted man. The revolt destroyed what little trust existed between the English and the Welsh inhabitants of Wales, shattering any pretence of parity between them. Despite the fact that a number of the English ...”

“... 14th-century French mystic and poet Marguerite Porete devised a visionary ladder of meditation and self-mortification that allowed her to obliterate her selfhood in loving union with God. The idea of the transcendent power of love was perfected by Dante: Beatrice was both a real person and a miracle, the promise of salvation in the form of a beautiful ...”

“... The (now published) notes evoke dramatic narratives of captures (Nabokov was tirelessly self-referential in such matters), the ravishing detail and the velvety realism of the imagined plates, fantasised as ‘arranged in series as done in the glass-topped trays of cabinets’. It was to have been a whole museum in a single book.I think he has a ...”

“... for this, as I suggested in the LRB at the time (23 February 2012), was at best weak and at worst self-defeating. After six years as a judge – and, going by some of his judgments, a good judge too – he has returned to the theme of the deference owed by law to politics. It is his bad luck to have done so at a moment when the UK’s political process, both ...”

“... argues, exceptional among monarchs in her thoroughness, and gave short shrift to those whose self-discipline didn’t match her own. Her stubbornness could be a handicap – it took several deaths in her immediate family before she accepted the benefits of smallpox inoculation. She performed countless (often ostentatious) acts of public and private ...”

“... did A.A. Milne intend it to be funny ha ha: he was paying tribute to the child’s extraordinary self-absorption and egocentricity. For me it was all far too near the recurrent dread that one’s mother might disappear one day and never come back; that one would come back from school and find an empty house, or worse still, no house at all. Disaster is ...”

“... into narrative, across several notebooks, in spiritual autobiographies that articulate a sense of self by recycling biblical scripts or searching minutiae for signs of God’s grace. Aubrey wrote that his brief outline autobiography was ‘to be interponed [inserted] as a sheet of wast-paper only in the binding of a Booke’. The urge to write a life often ...”

“... Who knew nothing, or wasn’t asked.There is a lot of formal travel between a cryptic, slightly self-mocking portrait like this one: Wandering this way and that Kept no note of my hither and thither Don’t know where I left my hat Nor the previous seven eitherand the unprotected sweep of Everything was beautiful on that sole evening, ma soeur After it ...”

“... like my other geese. He was himself: distinctive, intelligent, resourceful, congenial, loyal, self-sufficient when I was away, dependent when I was at home, healthy, able to defend himself against the other geese, knowing when to fight and when to give them a wide berth. And he could summon a sharp defence against humans too. I recall with such pleasure ...”

“... scattered throughout the Middle East: studio portraits in Mr Five Per Cent show the different self-stylings of Ottoman elites, from stiff European outfits to Arabian robes. For centuries Armenians and other ethnic groups under Ottoman rule had enjoyed certain protections and privileges, including religious freedom. These groups, or millets, were ...”

“... to her creations the sort of courteous interest one might take in a young cousin. Nothing about self-expression. Yet an absolute correspondence between her presence and her fiction. There is no pounce or scurry in these paragraphs but neither is there any hanging around. The attention is steady, whatever the disruption. Eeriness is delivered so easily that ...”