“... in the military reputation of England across Europe, and with it an equally steep rise in English self-confidence, which lasted for centuries, reinforced by replays at Poitiers, Verneuil and Agincourt. It wasn’t much shaken by Jeanne d’Arc and has perhaps not entirely faded even now. To quote Shakespeare, ‘Come the three corners of the world in ...”

“... novel The Gods Will Have Blood (1912): A young man with … a pockmarked face and an air of cold self-possession slowly mounted the tribune … Speaking in a clear voice, he delivered an eloquent, logical attack on the enemies of the Republic. He dealt forcibly [with them] by means of uncompromising and metaphysical arguments … He spoke at great ...”

“... in [Auden’s] own consciousness’. It expressed ‘an essential uncertainty of purpose and of self’, such that Auden’s ‘assured personal manner’ covered something very different. Taking up Empson’s account of the work, Leavis alluded to Empson’s own poems and their superiority, in mastery of their emotions, to Auden’s. ‘The ...”

“... landholdings: even in a good year, some 75 per cent of the population are less than 25 per cent self-sufficient in the main food crop, maize. The statistics are miserable. In 2001, the UNDP Human Development Index placed Malawi at number 151 out of 162 countries (those ranked lower were all experiencing, or had recently experienced, a state of war). Life ...”

“... variety of socio-economic modernisation: industrialisation, the arrival of the railways, municipal self-government, poverty, class conflict and, above all, huge population growth. German unification in 1871 did not change Breslau’s status – Silesia remained within Prussia, the largest federal state – but it did bring to the city national political ...”

“... about. MR MORTIMER: Dear lady, look at yourself. The knitting bag, the shapeless cardigan, the self-effacing attention to your employer’s every whim. Like the horse trough and the drinking fountain, you are a piece of social history. You are that thing of the past – the companion. MISS PLUNKETT: The companion! The companion? I am not the companion. Mrs ...”

“... or widowed woman with a little cash in the bank. My mother was partial to Lyons’s teashops, self-service, though with nice ladies who poured the tea from big metal pots, and often enough another woman sitting at our table to whom my mother could get talking and tell her miserable fortune to. These were public teapot teas, where we pretended that we were ...”

“... in London in January this year, that ‘we share their values’ and ‘it is massively in our self-interest to remain close allies.’ It might even be wise to strive to ‘remain the closest ally of the US, and influence them to continue broadening their agenda’. But Blair seems to have gone further: he insists on being the closest ally not only of the ...”

“... that the physical destruction of ancient Sparta would have been a less decisive blow to Spartan self-identity than the same destruction would have been to the Athenians? Do all cultures, or the same cultures at different times, invest the same beliefs in a strong correlation between what they build and who they are? Theorists and legislators have wrestled ...”

“... profiteers who stayed at home, a chancer, a coward prepared to bully the weak to make his small self seem larger. In 1978, three years before he died, he gave an interview to L’Express, which Callil translates. In it he denies the Holocaust, saying that all the evidence for it is Jewish propaganda and lies. Anyway, he says, his task was to supply ...”

“... of the stars in Latin. But the seal barking away on the top of Evelyn’s headboard was his self-illustrated, thousand-page magnum opus on gardens, Elysium Britannicum. Sylva grew but the Elysium exploded. He included anything which could conceivably come under the heading of gardening, from the elements to compost, apiculture to hydraulics, classical ...”

“... there? Is it Samson the hero, Samson the lummox, or Samson the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive, incommensurate revenge? According to David Grossman, all Jewish children when they first hear the story learn to call him Samson the Hero. He is wrong about this, but then my Jewish childhood was not in Hebrew or in Israel. I recall the Samson ...”

“... White House. Serving as Bush’s science adviser since near the beginning of his first term is a self-described Democrat, John Marburger III, a physicist and former university president. Unstinting in his repeated defence of the Bush administration’s maltreatment of science, Marburger is described by Mooney as ‘a rather tragic figure’. Yes, but ...”

“... in India it is 64. The villages we happened to see in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces appeared to be self-sustaining farming communities, without the visible suffering of similar hamlets in India or Latin America. The Tibetans in these provinces – unlike, by most accounts, those in Tibet – seemed to be thriving, no doubt because they are an unthreatening ...”

“... individualism’ (thanks to the introduction of European firearms), a ‘new sense of self’ (thanks to European mirrors), and a rise in ‘male vanity’ (thanks to imported cosmetics). Such claims are asserted rather than demonstrated; to a reader they feel like interpretive missiles launched without plan or preparation from some authorial ...”