“... both a necromancer communicating with the dead and a pilgrim ‘walking down the landscape of the self’, as he described it. ‘It is in many ways a remaking of the self in which all of the parts have been realigned, redistributed and reassembled into a new being of sense and harmony.’Wilson, whose given name was ...”

“... at the Brookings Institution in April 2023, for instance – the NDIS is historically self-conscious. The basic Biden narrative was of America’s fall from greatness, starting in the 1990s, when the industrial fabric of the nation began to fray and China’s manufacturing capacity surged. Now China and other competitors are rising fast. The home ...”

“... get a licence to film in public places or screen his films publicly. The festival can be jarringly self-congratulatory, but it also has real power: the decision to include a particular film makes a dissident director into a celebrity, which gives them a level of protection in their home country. Despite everything, it was a subdued Cannes. On the second ...”

“... a story,’ Tokarczuk wonders, ‘that would go beyond the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self?’ Yes there can, she thinks, and it will be told by ‘a new kind of narrator – a “fourth-person” one … a mysterious, tender narrator … a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen’. ‘Seeing everything,’ she ...”

“... again. The West, in its containment of Russia, has guaranteed not only the independence but the self-defined territorial integrity of Russia’s western neighbours. This could well mean supporting their revenge and reconquest in places lost to them thirty years ago – sometimes with good reason. Ilya BudraitskisThousands​  of people have taken to the ...”

“... of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement tracts – volumes that were all in the grand, glass-fronted bookcase. Therein lay knowledge. Therein lay my father’s ...”

“... years and where her husband died is a luxury she doesn’t deserve. She’s been targeted for self-eviction. Essentially, the government is trying to starve her out. Without the government allowance she receives in the form of housing benefit, she cannot pay her rent, and the government has cut the allowance so it’s no longer enough to cover the rent on ...”

“... still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be seven thousand millionaires while four million people in the capital survive on $2 a day. Poverty is even more pronounced in rural areas. About eight million Angolans, or 37 per cent of the ...”

“... but he did so with eloquence: he could bring back Passchendaele in all its horrors without showing self-pity. Much later he made several appearances in a BBC TV series on the Great War.Nevertheless, I wonder about his Army career. He was out there for four years, with people dying like flies, yet the only promotion he ever got was from driver to signaller. He ...”

“... the mark of a town on its knees. To lose its high street is a bitter blow to a place’s sense of self-worth, but the collapse of traditional small retailers is hardly a mystery, when a shining, ample Morrisons sucks up shoppers in the heart of town, and retail warehouses and Amazon take most of the rest.Millions of pounds’ worth of regeneration money was ...”

“... were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell ...”

“... misreading is not uncommon. The novel is seen as the archetypal Puritan adventure story, a self-sufficient fiction which transcends the controversies Defoe addresses in his journalism. This is rather like saying that TV programmes such as Castaway and Big Brother tell us nothing about the social moments that created them. Although some recent scholars ...”

“... moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, remembered a self-portrait Monroe drew alongside a sketch of a Negro girl in ‘a sad-looking dress, one sock falling down around her ankles’. And according to Gloria Steinem, when the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles was reluctant to hire a black singer named Ella ...”

“... wife, ‘stuff[ed] away in a shabby apartment’. Said didn’t spare himself, including a mocking self-portrait of a clueless employee called Mufid who idles away his time on things that were ‘utterly lost on everyone else’. Brennan presents the lost manuscript (and a story Said submitted around the same time to the New Yorker) as evidence of the novelist ...”

“... men in the grip of a huge existential crisis. Pollitt is the most imposing, a tough fanatic of self-evident ability, confident of his views, struggling to reconcile his Englishness and his Bolshevism. ‘Please remember, Comrade Dutt,’ he says at one point, ‘you won’t intimidate me by that language. I was in this movement practically before you were ...”