“... being swamped by repetition, and of replicating Petrarch’s story. The worst do indeed repeat and self-replicate endlessly. But it also means that the Petrarchan love sonnet has a touch of what came to be thought of as the sublime: because it does not quite tell a story it seems always to be gesturing to something beyond itself, a love which is never either ...”

“... have been a failed expedition to the east led by Ingvar the Far-Travelled. By contrast, a rather self-satisfied stone from Yttergärde in Sweden memorialises a man called Ulf, who took three ‘gelds’, or pay-offs, in England: one from Tosti (unknown, not King Harold Godwinsson’s brother), one from Thorketill (probably ‘the Tall’, a leader who ...”

“... emperor Mutsuhito in Japan’s brilliant Meiji Restoration of 1868. The movement advocated ‘self-strengthening’ in industry and the military, reforms in government expenditure, investment in agriculture and education (for men and women), constitutional monarchy with a representative legislature, and the abolition of footbinding. Chang attributes all ...”

“... buses had all stopped, so I had to walk about three miles home. The next day, after an overnight self-inflicted haircut that made me look insane, I was back at the Commons. The guards recognised me and would not let me into the Strangers’ Gallery. I saw the fire alarm button, broke the glass and set it off. Although no fire bells rang I was in ...”

“... that separates the writer from the man of the world’: ‘A book is the product of a different self (“un autre moi”) from the one we display in our habits, in society, in our vices.’ Henry James’s story ‘The Private Life’ makes the same argument and Yeats says something very similar. But Proust gives the argument a particular twist. He ...”

“... to Every Purpose under Heaven. We see him accompany his children to another child’s birthday, self-hatingly pose for photographs for a newspaper, conduct a long conversation about his personality and ethics in a pub with his friend Geir, attend and throw dinner parties, and sit like a ‘feminised’ male with his daughter on his lap at a music programme ...”

“... that Russia intended to annex Crimea, many were quick to remind Putin of the anachronistic and self-defeating nature of military conquest in an age of globalisation: ‘What he needs to understand,’ an unnamed senior member of the Obama administration said, ‘is that, in terms of his economy, he lives in the 21st-century world, an interdependent ...”

“... outlandish to consider the possibility of an Alawite redoubt in western Syria and of Kurdish self-rule: a de facto independence that would change not only Iraq but also Turkey, Syria and Iran. Israel and the Western powers are already voicing concern about what might happen in Jordan. No doubt they will all resist demands to recognise any attempted ...”

“... happened,’ a senior official said despairingly. ‘It is beyond a joke.’ Also comical – and self-defeating – are the government’s attempts to prop up civilian morale in the face of humiliating defeat. Isis keeps putting out professionally made films showing its successes, as well as publicising its atrocities against Shia and government ...”

“... tirade is like listening to a post-dinner Christopher Hitchens in full flow, but without the self-doubt. Perhaps predictably, the critical prominence of De tribus faded after the 18th century, although there were occasional reprintings. One appeared in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1904, ‘privately printed for the subscribers’, an anonymous work attributed to ...”

“... a career in the 1950s did it in the interval between the end of social stigma and the beginning of self-reproach. In that sense they never had it so ...”

“... and baptism, and the sign of its presence was a flow of tears. Weeping was not simply emotional self-indulgence or psychological release. It was efficacious. As Dixon puts it, ‘in the Catholic worldview, tears could do things. They had real, spiritual consequences for the souls of the penitent on earth as well as for the wept-for departed.’ Thomas ...”

“... sort of emotional illness, in the course of which he rejects the friend who has been his second self. The precipitating event is a midnight lark on the ice in December 1970, when both boys have turned 18: With a few hefty thrusts of their skates they raced across the lake in a straight line and braked sideways-on in the middle of it all with a shower of ...”

“... lash out at stronger women make regular appearances in her books. But women who cling to a code of self-martyring femininity come in for an even more withering inspection, and the characters Spark likes generally give them short shrift. In Loitering with Intent (1981), the narrator, Fleur, turns the tables on her lover’s tiresomely needy wife, Dottie, who ...”

“... only had a few months as kaiser before he died of throat cancer, handing on the throne to his self-willed son Wilhelm II, about whom neither MacGregor nor the exhibition has much to say. The show doesn’t dodge the difficult questions. Both Paul Celan’s Death Fugue and Kiefer’s work feature here as ways of remembering the 12 years of Nazi rule, but ...”