“... secession from Nigeria and the war that followed became an inevitability.’ To him it is self-evident that an ethnic group known for its independence of mind could not easily be manipulated into supporting a war. He writes about the reaction among Igbo people after the Northern massacres: One found a new spirit among the people, a spirit one did not ...”

“... UK regulatory body advised against its being prescribed to under-18s because of concerns about ‘self-harm and suicidal thoughts’, adding that its use in young adults over 18 should be ‘closely monitored’ and that Seroxat was associated with unusually unpleasant withdrawal reactions in patients of all ages. So yes, it’s more than plausible that, in ...”

“... had some very sinister overtones for the papacy: Henry VIII had used it to justify his deeply self-righteous claim that he had never married a lady called Katherine of Aragon, and that God was very angry with him, both for having mistakenly thought that he had done so, and for allowing the pope to provide a dispensation for the marriage to take ...”

“... is, therefore, for each people a collective force of a definite amount of energy, impelling men to self-destruction. The victim’s acts which at first seem to express only his personal temperament are really the supplement and prolongation of a social condition which they express externally. Masaryk, another early theorist of suicide, believed that it was ...”

“... an extra bind in the trunk. It wasn’t until Harry realised what a powerful tool for self-promotion they could be that they became the focus of the show. In November 1895 he walked into the police station in Gloucester, Massachusetts and challenged the officers to handcuff him. He then proceeded to pick his way out of every pair of cuffs they ...”

“... absence. Like Roller, Appia wanted his designs to act as a direct emanation of the music. But this self-effacing attitude to her husband’s work failed to impress Cosima, who told Appia’s somewhat improbable advocate Houston Stewart Chamberlain that his sketches reminded her ‘only of the pictures that the explorer Nansen had brought back from the North ...”

“... compromising the moral standing of the democratic state. Then, helpfully, the monarchy self-destructed: King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah was killed in a massacre at the royal palace in 2001, supposedly by his son. So addled was the Royal State Council that they named the son, comatose with a bullet to the head at the end of the killing spree, the next ...”

“... by putting in more hours than anyone else. He spent his life envious of the idle, effortless, self-delighting genius (or so he imagined Saul Bellow) and those with better educations and more refined childhoods. Growing up, he told the Paris Review, ‘there were no books that I remember in the house, no records, music, pictures on the wall. On Sundays I ...”

“... are obscure or surprising. Watteau’s Gilles of 1716–18 is reproduced on the same spread as a self-portrait of c.1710 by the Korean Yun Du-so. Yun Du-so looks hard at you from the last page of one section, Gilles less emphatically from the first page of the next. Gilles seems to ‘inhabit his own face with a certain unease. In his disquiet we can maybe ...”

“... an authority and as representing a person in words. For the bearer, such a text was not a second self but an instrument. It generated an occasion, a performance, during which one’s identity was affirmed, or made up. Another kind of occasion on which identification was necessary is interesting to consider here, because it suggests other practices that were ...”

“... worry that history which did not inform present-day concerns amounts to little more than self-indulgent antiquarianism, but presented his practice as socially useful for its ‘excavation’ of the hidden or misunderstood concepts that underpinned the modern state. Pocock, on the other hand, feels no embarrassment about the sorts of inquiry that ...”

“... patients on Miltown became much less anxious. The difference was that doctors in this clinic had self-consciously adopted an enthusiastic, confident attitude towards the drug’s effectiveness. When they switched to a more neutral, experimental attitude, Miltown was no better than a placebo. A more elegant study to the same effect was published by Richard ...”

“... from false sense that reason took its rise? If what the senses tell us is not true Then reason’s self is naught but falsehood too. Can ears deliver verdict on the eyes? Can touch convict the ears, or taste the touch, of lies? Ancient Philosophy accords a good deal of attention to the philosophy of the Hellenistic period (the three centuries following the ...”

“... without a mediological analysis of their differences, have simply been collapsed into a single self-identical entity called ‘God’. But first, He who started it all: why did the Eternal One arrive so late? What was He doing during the 1.4 million years since the Acheulean carvings in Africa? Or the half million years since humans harnessed fire? Or the ...”

“... scene. Struggling, hopelessly and anxiously late, towards an end of sorts, burdened by his task, self-imposed yet steadily increased by others, in yet not of the society he must save, constantly misled, negligent of his family, tending to find himself not where he needs to be and compelled to do something not to his purpose – Ryder’s tale is an ...”