“... trouble. Lea had been elected to the US Senate in 1911 aged 31 and evidently had a penchant for self-publicity. With three junior officers and three sergeants, all Americans, he set off for Amerongen with the aim of snatching the Kaiser from Bentinck’s château and delivering him to Paris (or, as he much later bragged, to the US government, which would be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... She surely knew that her prose had to sign itself. Her essays, both in texture and content, were self-advertisements. She was pushing a project: her own kind of novel. She argued against the heavy, mercantile realism of Edwardian novelists such as Bennett and Galsworthy, writers who, it seemed to her, only notarised their characters by listing their ...”

“... threats posed by that insecurity – loss of a framework for living and the foundations of self-respect, which other social institutions are less able to compensate for than once they were. A second danger has to do with an old problem concerning power. Following an unpleasant if understandable logic, bullies gravitate towards the insecure. To the ...”

“... enhance society and the environment). Patrick Geddes had predicted this in the 1890s, along with self-government. Which is why Geddes – a recurrent presence in the novels of Alasdair Gray – counts as a patron of devolution, and indeed of that peaceable civic Europe in which Gray’s ‘Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Republic’ would find its place. The ...”

“... natural history of the New World, and beginning extensive new studies of British invertebrates. Self-education accompanied the education of others, as it would throughout his life. His spiritual life also began to take new directions. It was during his London years that Gosse acquired a belief in the imminence of the Second Coming, when Christ would ‘send ...”

“... elections of December 2001 outright. Ravalomanana is often called the ‘Yoghurt King’. He is a self-made millionaire, head of Tiko, the largest Malagasy-owned private business, which makes and markets yoghurt and soft drinks throughout the country. The Yoghurt King promised government reform: honesty, efficiency, even cleanliness. As Mayor of ...”

“... anywhere in Europe, exactly why everyone else’s version of an incident or situation is flawed, self-interested, corrupt or downright insane. If there is any consensus, it is that Sicily is changing. The island has begun to resume the status it once enjoyed as a centre of Mediterranean civilisation. Immigrants, illegal or otherwise, flood onto the mainland ...”

“... connected with his singularly centreless personality: ‘his fiction is an oblique form of self-portrait,’ and readers ‘who have not swallowed the critical dogma that tries to exclude authors from their works’ should find the life-story illuminating. Which it is. Green’s Modernist textual density and his authorial absenteeism are here ...”

“... claustrophobia hovered over it, giving rise to doubts about the limitless possibilities of art and self-reinvention – the very things everyone came for in the first place. The Lion’s Head was gone, but there was still the Beatrice Inn, still Thomas’s White Horse Tavern, still the beautiful red Village Cigars. And there were still a few of the older ...”

“... from it.’ Craig, historian though he is, is hard put to find much of interest here. Fontane’s self-reinventions were far from complete. In 1870, shortly after the publication of his third Wanderings volume, he became theatre critic for the Vossische Zeitung, a post he held for twenty years. Craig’s chapter on Fontane’s theatre writing is probably the ...”

“... In February, the North Korean government announced that it had ‘manufactured nukes for self-defence to cope with the Bush administration’s ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle’ the DPRK. This could be a bluff, but the information obtained by the IAEA inspectors before they were expelled suggests that Pyongyang has all 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 ...”

“... if you have enemies; the new psychology works only if you believe the enemy is your (disowned) self. Treating the shell-shocked, the wounded and vulnerable and mad, as we treat ourselves is relatively easy (though for many people virtually impossible); the really tall order – at once nonsensical, and yet with a certain logic to it – is to live as ...”