“... from Aerial: fond dreams of invisibility; pained bafflement at Elvis’s trashy reclusion; the self-imposed exile of Charles Foster Kane; and Joan of Arc, ‘beautiful in her armour …’) Ever since, she has lived a life in many ways more like a writer’s than a modern pop star’s: pop’s own J.K. Rowling. (With her Roman Catholic background and taste ...”

“... into tribute-paying subjects, the militaristic propaganda of the Funeral Oration and the self-congratulatory civic grandeur of the Parthenon itself. What’s significant about all this, but seldom emphasised, is that the basic evidence, such as it is, has been in plain view all along: Herodotus, Thucydides, Old ...”

“... words but very few deeds. When he assented to the five-year interim arrangements for Palestinian self-governance in the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat agreed to exclude Jerusalem from the areas that would be governed pro tempore by the PA. Local leaders, notably the late Faisal Husseini, refused to agree to this, which is one reason Yitzhak Rabin, who ...”

“... government that returned in 1973. But even if Juan Carlos’s resolve was partly inspired by self-interest, at least he had enough sense to see that his own fate depended on a civilian government. If the king’s opposition undermined the rebellion, what snuffed it out was the inertia of the military elite. Each of the country’s 11 military governors ...”

“... which is in turn causing the predicament of governments to intensify, as confidence sinks and the self-fulfilling expectations of a second downturn take hold. This in turn puts pressure on expectations about governments’ abilities to repay their debts, which further lowers confidence, and so on. It’s starting to look as if the best-case scenario for the ...”

“... the American city or the performance of ego but into travel and nature writing and the negation of self through the practice of Zen Buddhism. By the time Raditzer appeared, Matthiessen had already published Wildlife in America, a study now widely considered a founding document of the modern conservation movement. (Even this had an odd paternal ...”

“... delight in maintaining that such rules should not be broken, whether by head-butt or injudicious self-revelation. When two thugs intent on kidnap at the very least follow advertising executive Roger Thornhill into a packed lift in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, his mother, who knows what he’s afraid of, but considers him a fantasist, asks them if ...”

“... sarcastic, often cruel to his male friends, and treated women appallingly. There is an element of self-portraiture in his 1918 obituary of Wedekind, whom he describes as ‘ugly, brutal, dangerous’. Brecht’s ambition comes through in a diary entry written when he was 22: ‘I am seized with a wish to have the whole world delivered: I wish all things to be ...”

“... idleness and fecklessness of the black Jamaicans. He was equally scornful about their desire for self-government. A character in Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act remarks that all of us had beliefs at the age of 17 that would embarrass us now. Vinen found that it was not unusual for ex-national servicemen to be shocked when they reread their diaries and ...”

“... of his discipline and focus. He was, according to his wife, ‘one of those inexplicably solid, self-sufficient and never-needy men who got by on air and water, impervious to injury or disease’. But he also had a bit of luck. When he started his business he designed a logo that included a paint roller resting at the bottom of a rainbow, recognisable to ...”

“... exercised in physics. This is not least because it needs to have a significant element of self-consciousness, making the identity of the ‘we’ who are engaged in reflecting an unavoidable focus of that reflection. We need to see metaphysics as an enterprise that is completely different from any of the natural sciences, an enterprise that, unlike ...”

“... in mining overseas. Jobs dismissed him to Isaacson as a ‘con man’, but their careers – from self-discovery to charismatic leadership to great wealth – bear out the similarities between them that friends noticed at Reed. Before the string of product hits that began in 1998 – iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad – Jobs had a few lost years. In 1983, he ...”

“... that it was falling but there was no doubt whatsoever that it was. She took a half-step forward, a self-conscious shuffle, and let her knuckles catch under his jaw. A stricken feeling and a voluptuousness. To put your tongue where another tongue was kept. There was no way of telling was it the best thing or the worst thing that could happen. The ‘she’ is ...”

“... and, without considering the consequences for Europe or for the world or for his bourgeois self, he took for granted that Germany should win its war of racial conquest. Empathy has its limits. When you probe more deeply into his letters, you find that he had bought into Nazi ideology, even if the benefits that accrued to him personally from Nazism were ...”

“... to the old educated class and the rapidly growing body of the aspiring and politically conscious self-educated. Even among these, Overy’s footnotes show, circulations of more than 50,000 – the order of magnitude of the Left Book Club and above the contemporary level of a bestseller – were unusual, except in the tense prewar months of 1938-39. Overy’s ...”