“... tariff barriers, eventually facilitated national recoveries – emphasis was placed on economic self-sufficiency. Steiner also deals here with Hitler’s rise to the German Chancellorship, for which mass bankruptcies and unemployment were a necessary precondition. In contrast, her second section plays down the importance of the Japanese Kwantung Army’s ...”

“... from the Discovery trip and then been lionised around the country, he became focused, but also self-important, pompous and petulant. Crane, always wanting to find in favour of Scott, admits to his ‘first real sense of disappointment’ in him. Perhaps he had found a sense of purpose at last – he speaks for the first time of polar exploration as ‘his ...”

“... Observatory tended to opt for hierarchically organised networks crowned by their own institutions. Self-registering instruments that worked around the clock without complaint appealed to them, as did human observers who approximated machines as closely as possible. These would-be managers of science spoke with Bounderby-esque good cheer about human drudges who ...”

“... that the nine-year-old ‘refused to conform to the customs or routine of school life and exuded a self-confidence which could only have been interpreted as a form of provocation’. The headmaster warned Leo, then colonial secretary, that Julian was ‘far too inclined to criticise and, I fancy, has a very good opinion of himself’. He was ...”

“... Second World War had started, she continues the theme, with the suicide of nations and Europe’s self-destruction in the ongoing war. After the war, she was convinced that when Britain backed Tito rather than Mihailovitch to be leader of Yugoslavia a gross mistake was made. (The editor of the letters might have given a fuller account of this crucial ...”

“... of the Scottish Enlightenment in the evolution of the Whig tradition. Indeed, iconoclasts from the self-confident peripheries who debunk Old England’s identity and past glories often invoke Pocock’s name; but they cannot count him among their number. On the contrary, Pocock flags up achievements scarcely imagined by the most John Bullish of ...”

“... Minister who senses that there is probably a better alternative but who lacks the authority or self-confidence to choose it and a Chancellor of formidable personality who is a rigidly orthodox practitioner of ‘this Treasury’s’ traditional policies. That New Labour should end up like this is as depressing an outcome as can be imagined. I suspect that ...”

“... New Jersey, malls have become the place of choice to meet for immigrant housewives with a sense of self,’ the novelist Bharati Mukherjee observes. ‘Driving to the mall is itself an empowering adventure. Not to be at home, cooking for husband and children? Not to be ministering to husband’s mother? To be so selfish? Back in India most women didn’t ...”

“... stomach’, and intensify to the point where they start to resemble skinnings and stabbings of the self. Like Marguerite Duras in La Douleur, which she claimed was a wartime journal she found in a drawer, but had no memory of writing, Murakami lays claim to a share in others’ crimes against humanity. His character Okada becomes a kind of clairvoyant ...”

“... Victorian engineers could pull off when motivated. It had given the nation a temporary flush of self-confidence. It had inspired Tennyson to pay suitable tribute in an ode which thereafter appeared in all collected editions of his poems, reminding winners of school prizes down the generations of the wonders that had been, and perhaps today inspiring Andrew ...”

“... in spite of the mix-and-match approach, is there anyone whose problems are worth examining from a self-help point of view – which is where you are likely to find this book in a bookshop. We are not meant to think like that, however. Nor are we meant to think too hard about the efficacy (or otherwise) of the so-called talking cure. Orbach writes with such ...”

“... to stitch it together again. Marriage, friendship and publication had by now cured the desperate self-pity of some of the earlier verse. The matter is often light and delicate – lace, sea-spray and butterflies. Nevertheless, it is balanced by a recognition of darkness – partly the darkness of the war – and by the lingering pull of earthiness and the ...”

“... most of them undertaken in the course of one of her 11 pregnancies. The intellectually vigorous, self-improving culture of the Methodists made the children what they were. George had a library of a thousand books, which Hannah had to pack and unpack. These were the ordinary conditions of such a life. Indeed there were complaints from the congregation that ...”

“... its virtues, passions and pathos, Hillenbrand’s modern horse book feels trammelled by its own self-consciousness, as if it were forced to tell a meta-legend rather than a legend. Its attention to the cultural baggage – to Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt – may well be called for by hindsight, but I suspect that what made Seabiscuit such a legend in his ...”

“... which followed, and of its utter failure to develop the territory politically in preparation for self-government. Only now are there signs of a Belgian Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a movement towards a more candid confrontation with the past. The curious ExitCongoMuseum exhibition, at Leopold’s old Africa museum at Tervuren, has been retracing the ...”