“... lack of US control is even more apparent in the provinces. Recently US and Iraqi commanders gave a self-congratulatory press conference on the situation in Baquba, the capital of the fruit-growing province of Diyala. ‘The situation in Baquba,’ they claimed, ‘is reassuring and under control’; nasty rumours, they said, were being ‘circulated by bad ...”

“... to the short duration of her chosen turning points. Aware that even decisive moments can hardly be self-contained, she often reaches back to investigate earlier precedents or to look into biographical factors. Even so, however, there are risks of oversimplification attached to this way of framing history. Like Zara Steiner, in her more recent study of the ...”

“... with debtor nations, Mellon ‘did little and stayed quiet, still governed by his faith in the self-regulation of markets’. In 1930 and 1931, as the situation worsened, he continued to counsel inaction and spent more and more of his time on his art collection. ‘Buying pictures covertly from the Soviets captured his imagination in a way that presiding ...”

“... like a children’s book, Mister Pip is not one, and it is wiser, at least at intervals, than the self-help book it sometimes resembles. Odd though it sounds, it is impossible not to wonder whether in writing this sometimes wonderful, sometimes tedious, unfinished-seeming novel about reading to an audience Jones ever paused to wonder about his own ...”

“... Western nihilism, 9/11 is cast as the latest in the West’s seemingly interminable catalogue of self-inflicted blows against its own dominant myth of progress. The transposition is revealing, for it suggests that Gray writes from the assumption that, if there were progress, it would have taken the form of the universal adoption of either Communism or ...”

“... Percy Harrison Fawcett – he is always styled ‘Colonel’: a piece of discreet self-promotion – was born in Torquay in 1867. His father was a blue-blooded spendthrift and crony of the Prince of Wales, who died young of alcohol and consumption when Fawcett was 17, and is chiefly remembered as a brilliant batsman for Cambridge University ...”

“... grouches against actual socialism in the Notebooks only underscore how abrasive Frost believed the self-knowledge that others provide could be. ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ sounds more gentle when it claims that a poem, like love, ‘begins in delight and ends in wisdom’. But in the Notebooks this wisdom is not the poet’s own: ‘All art begins at the ...”

“... wealth, eradicate unemployment, pay due respect to war veterans, and, in general, revive the self-sacrificing spirit of the Islamic Revolution. For Khatami, the history of Iran had been ‘the struggle for democracy’. For Ahmadinejad, it was the struggle to establish ‘true’ Islam. On the eve of the ballot, Bush helped Ahmadinejad by dismissing ...”

“... have also launched Marcus Aurelius into wider modern fame, as the bestselling father of self-help guides, popular psychology and ‘spiritual teaching’. The secret of this success is not simply the folk wisdom that generous translation can construct out of Marcus’ thorny Greek, which he chose over his native Latin for writing these philosophical ...”

“... quality to her speech which drew people near’) and then, in the distinctive tones of the self-help book, reveals Josetta and Roxy to be ‘my own inventions based on a cross-section of cases’, it is hard to resist the suspicion that she no longer entirely believes in the reality of what she is writing about. She no longer seems even to register ...”

“... with the salesmen behind the mortgage boom. His conclusion: ‘In that restaurant, crammed with self-satisfied know-nothings, we had gazed upon the amoral soul of the housing boom, the crux, the fulcrum, the place where so many dreams would begin, and where surely heartbreak and financial collapse must follow.’ The salesmen were stuffing mortgages down ...”

“... less learned and less official travel writers began to describe the culture of Aleppo with the self-regarding swagger of a militia officer stationed in an English provincial town. In 1816, James Silk Buckingham (a future MP) devotes the first few thousand words of his account to the complaint that he has not been treated as a gentleman by the English ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The ‘proliferation of visual sensations’ creates a constant flux in which any sense of self-orientation is merely momentary and tentative. De Kooning was impressed by Cézanne’s intuition that ‘every brushstroke has its own perspective,’ adding: ‘He didn’t mean it in the sense of Renaissance perspective’ – which is oriented toward an ...”

“... father, took up religion and philosophy and became a churchgoer. He was jolted out of his self-absorption, according to his mother, by the July Days of 1830: ‘C’est le canon qui l’a guéri,’ she would say. He sketched, but never completed, a ‘Revolutionary Symphony’. He became a participant in the salons at which he’d once been ...”