“... Hefner wasn’t sure there would be a second. He is now 90, and still editor-in-chief. Prone to self-mythology, Hefner claimed he was Kinsey’s ‘pamphleteer, spreading the news of sexual liberation through a monthly magazine’. For all this supposed reforming zeal, it was only in the 1960s that Hefner began defining ‘The Playboy Philosophy’ – a ...”

“... their 11-year-old son, Giles. Johnson’s child characters are among her best. They tend to be self-determining if ostensibly compliant. Giles ‘knew that he was supposed to be unobservant’. Led by him, they all anticipate their meals – the croques monsieur, the blanquettes de veau, the éclairs, fondues and meringues – as if their thoughts need ...”

“... gradually uncoupling from nature, agriculture and the horse. But whatever one makes of its epochal self-consciousness, this is a vastly imaginative way of writing cultural history. Raulff is capable of drawing a line from, say, the Warburgian theorising of the retired cavalry officer Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes to the biopolitics of the Middle Ages; or ...”

“... Kim Jong-un had once sat there. We went up the Juche Tower, a monument to the DPRK’s ideology of self-sufficiency, more than three times the height of Nelson’s Column. It has an electrical flame on top that’s often the only illuminated thing in the night sky (there are frequent power cuts). From the viewing platform I watched a parade rehearsal in Kim ...”

“... for Corvo, an account of Symons’s efforts to untangle the life and lies of Frederick Rolfe, self-styled Baron Corvo and author of Hadrian VII. It was one of the first and best in what is now a subspecies of life-writing, the biography of the biography. The Quest for Queen Mary, however, goes one better by adding Vickers’s own role in shaping the ...”

“... in castigating Jewish critics of Israel’s xenophobic and far-right nationalistic policies as self-hating Jews. I believe​ I am more aware than most of the profound Jewish religious attachment to the Land of Israel. I was raised in a deeply Zionist and religiously observant home. Moreover, I am old enough to have experienced personally what it meant to ...”

“... Zhemchuzhina had not yet acquired the poise and elegance of her later years, but she was intent on self-improvement, studying first in a workers’ preparatory school and then at university for the first five years of her marriage. In 1927, she became chief party organiser of the Novaia zarya (New Dawn) perfume factory, and was promoted to factory director in ...”

“... sovereignty of the king-in-Parliament, and for whom ideas of federation or devolution, let alone self-government, were delusory or actively pernicious.Two centuries later, the Kilbrandon Report of 1973 shied away from any sort of federal solution, on the grounds that it worked poorly elsewhere and defied ‘common sense’ – phrasing often deployed by ...”

“... and fellow feeling for the downtrodden, including slaves, Johnson was not only stubborn and self-absorbed, but incorrigibly racist. During the Civil War he came to embrace emancipation, but mostly because he believed it would liberate poorer white farmers from the tyranny of wealthy planters, whom he called the slaveocracy. His sympathy didn’t extend ...”

“... in it), the video games he liked (Age of Empires and Call of Duty) and his hidden talents (piano, self-taught). We know that his idea of fun as an adolescent was to dress up as a police officer and harass the crowds at a shopping mall. We know that he once locked up his own mother in a palace and forced his diabetic cousin Prince Mohammed bin Nayef to ...”

“... than the Royal Ballet. To its admirers, the company represents dedication, rigour, sublimation of self and respect for tradition. There are few more exuberantly beautiful spectacles than its dancers in flight. They describe their sense of comradeship, the joy they take in their work, the ideals they share. But as directors, administrators and board members ...”

“... itself is supposed to be enough: confess, and you are absolved, forgiven, made new. But the self-exposure in Priestdaddy is a slippery kind. Lockwood’s attempted suicide at 16 is related in a few glancing paragraphs in the middle of a story about the voice lessons she took as a teenager. After she swallowed a bottle of Tylenol, her parents took her to ...”

“... the right circumstances, a particular general may wield clout approaching MacArthur’s before he self-destructed. This was the case with Colin Powell in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, and with David Petraeus when the Iraq Surge of 2007-08 seemed, briefly, to represent a historic triumph. At other times, imperious civilians keep generals on a short ...”

“... Corbyn has a serious chance of becoming prime minister. It would take an extraordinary act of self-denial to step back from that. If Corbyn decides to privilege the movement at the expense of the parliamentary party then British politics risks getting stuck. The return of two-party politics has entrenched divisions without showing any clear way of ...”

“... in the service of JFK’s campaigns for the Senate and the presidency, and who to the end was a self-interested and calculating figure, fearful of failure and of his father’s disapproval. Tye rejects this Manichean interpretation. Acknowledging what he calls the ‘duelling aspects of Bobby’s political soul’, he describes a man who matured, not merely ...”