“... interventions contravened its own much-lauded war aim, bruited in the 1941 Atlantic Charter, of ‘self-determination’ for everyone. (Churchill wasn’t bothered; he thought the Atlantic Charter only applied to Europeans.) The Congo, wrote Ralph Bunche, later a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was in OSS during the war, ‘has quite enough problems without ...”

“... the Central Committee of the Communist Party claimed that a liberal cabal had tricked Palach into self-immolation. Zátopek was one of those accused. The accusation ruined him. Instead of being executed or sent to the uranium mines, the Prague Spring dissenters were punished by being forced out of Czech society. By the mid-1970s, more than 300,000 people had ...”

“... to the soul, producing therein … an abundance of happiness, animation, openness, stimulation, self-contentment, generosity and freedom from cares and sorrows … It is wine that provides excellence to society and conversation … and there is nothing that makes possible relations of intimacy and confidence between friends so tastefully and pleasantly and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... revelled in, the subject of artist and model. On this occasion, however, he denied himself such self-reflexive subjects, presumably realising they could not meet the demands imposed by the commission. How else to explain the absence of traces of the studio composition in the final design? The central pyramid of light has gone. Lacking, too, are the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... media and public, such as Aden and Borneo; and then in Northern Ireland. With their aggression and self-regard, the Paras were not well suited to often hostile civilian environments such as Derry and Belfast. ‘In November 1971,’ Parr writes, ‘after a mother of eleven was blinded by a rubber bullet, the Guardian reported: “Undoubtedly the regiment is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the 20th century, appeared in Italy in the years before the First World War. Fascism, the original self-identified totalitarian political ideology, no less brashly expressive of modern times, emerged in Italy in the years immediately following the war. Neorealism, a spontaneous development without leaders and with few manifestos, which took shape in the last ...”

“... does not know’) shows that Proust is really getting into his melancholy swing, and that even self-pity can become a game. The last piece in the series describes a person who is able to get over much loving and suffering because he can forget them, as he forgets everything. ‘Time like the sea takes everything away.’ There is a reason for this ...”

“... that. And I expected to see myself do worse.’The stories circle the question of Fuckhead’s self-contradictory behaviour. One minute he helps a stranger home, the next he threatens to beat up a woman whose husband has sold him bad drugs. ‘Fuckhead’s very hostile but at the same time he’s worshipful,’ Johnson explained. ‘He displaces his hopes ...”

“... revolutions of the previous century, on whose leaders – Garibaldi, Bolívar, Martí – Castro self-consciously modelled himself.Castro’s early reforms had a puritanical edge. The regime shut down brothels and casinos. Out of some lingering attachment to bourgeois morals, Castro insisted that all the guerrilla boyfriends and girlfriends of the Sierra ...”