“... grounds to treat his life as a key to the successes of Georgian intellectual life, its far-sighted self-confidence and almost violent optimism. His most famous sermon, delivered on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot’s defeat and the Glorious Revolution’s triumph, notoriously imagined ‘laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error ...”

“... in the act of being colonised: a foetus is a hijacker, the pregnant ‘they’ a compromised self. You experience this crisis of identity most acutely when you’re invisibly pregnant, in the first 12 weeks, when you’re tasked with growing a placenta and your plasma volume begins to spike, when your cardiac output increases by 30 per cent, when the ...”

“... announced that eight Orvietani had tested positive. Five were in hospitals elsewhere; three were self-isolating at home. Four days ago: 20,603 positive; 2853 new cases; 2335 recovered; 1809 dead. On Sunday, 15 March the local news reported that a haematologist in Perugia had tested positive. The pope walked through the semi-deserted streets of Rome, his ...”

“... by the coronavirus, and chose to ignore the information. America’s Covid-19 crisis is in part self-inflicted, like the other humiliations it has suffered since 11 September: the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, the Trump presidency.The death toll will be further increased by the erosion of public trust, fuelled not only by extreme ...”

“... sort of knowledge. Here the adult daughter reimagines her mother through the eyes of her child self and tries to comprehend the woman who tormented her but who also bought her pastries and made her laugh by imitating the silly men she met at the club. Sometimes the disjuncture begins at home. The most satisfying piece in Your Duck Is My Duck is the title ...”

“... She may think of herself as an outsider to a certain kind of feminism, to the marketing of ‘self-care’, to the relentless insistence on empowerment, transformation, healing and sharing. The thought of posting online with a hashtag repels her. She may have had friendships or relationships with questionable men, but she would take no satisfaction in ...”

“... an estate is a blank page on which to make their mark – a landscape-scale presentation of the self. This impulse to monumentalism used to find expression in the ownership of Scottish castles and paintings like Sir Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen. The land agency Strutt & Parker attributes the current buoyancy of the Scottish estate market (a record ...”

“... not only of the shifts in public tastes between fiction, science and poetry, but the mixture of self-sabotage and terrible luck that had him producing his best-remembered work at moments of personal and professional disaster. His first flush of suspense tales – ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ – were ...”

“... is now enshrined by the 2018 Basic Law. In the words of the law, ‘the right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.’ (Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, put it more bluntly in 2012: ‘This land is Jewish, it is not for the Arabs. There is no place here for the Arabs, and there will be no place for ...”

“... unbalanced, apt to express an opinion and to exhibit an author. Broad as its sympathies were, and self-effacing as Reitz may have wished to be, Heimat was not a balanced programme, and Margaret Thatcher would have found it unfair to entrepreneurs. Noel Annan has been saying in strong terms that the BBC has a duty to be ‘dispassionate’ about affairs of ...”

“... it. Among the most intriguing was Antigonus, nicknamed Gonatas, a member of the tiny cadre of self-appointed rulers we know today as the Hellenistic kings. His grandfather, Antigonus the One-Eyed, had been one of the Diadochi (‘successors’), the generals who served under Alexander the Great and fought to control his empire after his death in ...”

“... selection produce selfish genes that prescribe unselfishness? The examples of the workers’ self-denying behaviour, performed for the benefit of the colony, are mind-boggling: desert ants, which store the honeydew they collect in their crops, and which are specialised to serve as food storage receptacles (the repletes); foraging workers, in whom the ...”

“... Lakers, he published a book called The Winner Within, which included a chapter that warned against self-serving leadership titled ‘The Disease of Me’. But the real lesson he learned from coaching the Lakers is that you should always be the most important person in the room.This is the guy the Knicks hired as head coach, and what he instituted was the ...”

“... of the menopausal woman. Removed from reproductive use value, her ‘organs become purely self-referential. They have no further potential for family or spectacle or state: they’re outside every economy,’ directed towards ‘convivial and autonomous pleasure only’. The menopausal woman ‘neither begets nor works, but drifts’.For ...”

“... both mother and child by the child’s removal shortly after birth has long been a prompt to human self-scrutiny. Shakespeare’s Henry VI compares his inability to come to the aid of the Duke of Gloucester to the plight of a cow whose calf has been taken away from her at market. But it isn’t all helplessness. Arnold’s lyricism vividly captures in ...”