“... in the area around Baghouz six months later. The village finally fell on 23 March 2019, provoking self-congratulatory messages from Trump and other world leaders exulting over the destruction of the IS caliphate. Belief in its defeat was reinforced when the caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, blew himself up with a suicide vest on 27 October that year after he was ...”

“... the negation of the complete heteronomy of the isolated person through the collective self-realisation of the sick as a revolutionary class’. That may not be how most of those involved would put it today, but there is a sense in which Western electorates seem to be trying to form themselves into giant patients’ collectives, through which to ...”

“... are fictional or personal, it says they are an echo of a non-echo, the voice of a ghostly second self, someone who keeps not taking the road not taken. Is this what a poem is? What would it mean to think so?Romantic Shades and Shadows situates itself very clearly in the current academic landscape of literary studies. The long reign of the so-called close ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Herbert Morrison, never stopped intriguing against him). Churchill, by contrast, was notoriously self-seeking and greedy for cash. He abandoned first the Conservative Party, then the Liberals, and when back with the Conservatives was consistent only in his disloyalty. ‘Anyone can rat,’ he is supposed to have gleefully declared, ‘but it takes a certain ...”

“... the view of a single individual. The author of every utopia invariably takes his vision to be self-evidently the only possible one for the fully rational man. He is necessarily committed to the claim that there is a common purpose behind all human communities, a single goal, which most men have failed to reach because they were not clear-sighted enough to ...”

“... it descends into brutal civil war.In this context, radical political movements are shown to be self-deluding. They appear during stable eras but are made irrelevant, or are transformed past recognition, by real crisis. Cixin wants us to know that communism, especially, sucks. In the first scene of The Three-Body Problem, a 15-year-old girl is murdered in a ...”

“... prime minister, abandoned Spain’s long-standing recognition of Western Sahara’s right to self-determination. To the outrage of his leftist coalition partners, he endorsed Morocco’s plan for ‘autonomy’ in Western Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty. A ‘new era’ in Spanish-Moroccan relations commenced. It was soon felt on Mount Gurugu: the ...”

“... much background detail about Lloyd George’s relationship with Frances Stevenson and her willing self-immolation on the altar of his political career (clearly Frances would never have been permitted to keep Lloyd George awake at nights with nagging, as Asquith was kept awake in November 1916 by the midnight frenzies of Margot). There are some comprehensible ...”

“... novel for adults, Springtime and Harvest, a dainty romance, was rejected several times before he self-published it in 1901, a year after his marriage to Meta Fuller, a childhood friend. It sold a total of two hundred copies. His next few books didn’t fare much better, and Sinclair was forced to move with his wife and infant son to a three-room cabin ...”

“... his wife divorced. This highly publicised tragic episode marked an end to the tradition of heroic self-experiment that had begun with Kleitman’s descent into the Mammoth Cave, and hastened the shift to laboratory-based neuroscience. In 1963 Dement moved to California and set up the Stanford Sleep Research Centre, which would become the model for the modern ...”

“... goal my whole life: to become an Icelandic writer.’The reader is made aware of opinionatedness, self-confidence, indomitability, mercuriality, application, aggression. Qualities not attractive in themselves, and often put to the service of poorer ends. Guðmundsson frequently mentions Laxness’s charm. He asked a lot of his mother, his wives and his ...”

“... Portugal, where his religion had been outlawed and even converted Jews were under suspicion. As a self-proclaimed political emissary, he posed a risk to anyone who welcomed him. Every time he travelled, there was a chance that his letters of safe passage would not be recognised. A pure grifter could have found less dangerous ways of making a living. But it ...”

“... Catholicism – or anything that looked like it – was not fully appreciated by James, and his self-curated role as Rex Pacificus was seen, by an increasingly Puritan Parliament, as unheroic, even iniquitous. Buckingham shifted his loyalties towards Charles, and away from peace towards war. He was, by this point, the country’s leading politician, on a ...”

“... Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, puts it, under Trump the US acts ‘in the same narrowly self-interested, frequently exploitative way as many great powers throughout history’. Trump is not an isolationist, to the extent the term has any useful meaning, and does not propose a withdrawal from world power. On the contrary, Brands writes, on some ...”