“... much more than You or Him.’ He should have listened. The great 19th-century novels here become self-help books to guide a worried young man around the world of emotions and family. We all start off reading books as if they contained the secrets of our life, and later come to see that their greatness lies in the fact that they do no such thing. It’s hard ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... playing, without anyone noticing.’ Perhaps this first band was a way of establishing her musical self while concealing it at the same time.Her next step was to form her own band, the Marine Girls, in the summer of 1980 with some friends from school. Within weeks they’d made a tape on a borrowed four-track recorder and funded fifty copies through Saturday ...”

“... His brother Gianfranco, currently an undersecretary in Enrico Letta’s administration and a self-confessed cocaine user (not a crime in Italy), once attracted criticism for deploring the naming of Palermo’s airport after Falcone and Borsellino, suggesting instead Archimedes of Syracuse. How can the honoured society exist at all? One obvious reason is ...”

“... Israeli population constitutes a national group, whether Palestinian Arabs have the right to self-determination – don’t arise. As a first step, the Palestinian Authority must be persuaded to transform itself from the pseudo-government of a non-existent state into a campaigning leadership heading a mass movement for equal rights across Israel and the ...”

“... and the farm managers. Extremely concerned with his public reputation, he took pride in his own self-control. Those who knew him, however, were aware that he had a fierce temper. He was ‘tremendous in his wrath’, Jefferson recalled after Washington’s death, and slaves learned to steer clear when he was provoked. Like other owners, Washington relied ...”

“... with Iran. But Iranian policy is driven by strategic aims rather than impulses, and Trump’s self-congratulation may prove short-lived. How will he respond if Iran hits back harder?10 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... When he does state an opinion, it tends to be generous. Once or twice his caution verges on self-parody, as in his summary of the causes of the naval mutinies in 1798: ‘But when all has been said – when much has been discounted – it would seem only natural that, given developments at home and the pattern of distribution through the fleets, the ...”

“... system (one millennium before Copernicus) and explains it to her students with the casual self-assurance of an Ivy League professor. Outside her elegant classroom, Christian monks with Taliban-like beards swarm the streets. She has also been enlisted in other ideological battles. A Google search reveals her as an early feminist, a black martyr (she ...”

“... nonsense; and, more recently, Daniel Dennett, who indicts the discipline as largely ‘self-indulgent, clever play’. In almost every case, the philosopher who criticises philosophy wants his colleagues to redirect their intellectual efforts away from the ineffable, nonsensical or confused towards more worthwhile endeavours; a methodological ...”

“... the purges, the attempted coup, the smears – demonstrate (or confirm) the degree to which the self-appointed political ‘centre’ has drifted to the right, leading the spectrum of political possibility to contract accordingly. Corbyn’s left reformism is mild by the standards of earlier generations, by the standards of some other European ...”

“... viewed as lenient but which polarised Hungarian politics and set Hungary ‘on the path to a self-declared illiberal democracy’. Also little known but described expertly by Tooze is the reaction of China to the GFC, in what is perhaps the only unambiguous success story of this period. China’s rapid growth in earlier decades had been built on ...”