“... provinces into a new country for which its inhabitants evinced no enthusiasm. The United States, self-proclaimed heir to dominion over the Arab world, is now finding its way through the imperial morass. American Armed Forces secured the oil, the pipelines, the oil ministry, the airbases and the ports. They left the museums, the palaces, the hospitals and the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but prone to relapses, still somewhat delusional when sober and often in the grip of some New Age self-help regimen. It opens with Louanne’s death and Antrim’s feelings of relief, which soon give way to guilt and a sense of being haunted as he shops for an expensive bed and finds that no mattress will quite do: his mother’s ghost won’t let him ...”

“... problem in Hungary lies in the resurgence of the extreme right, and specifically of Jobbik, the self-declared ‘radically patriotic Christian party’ that gained just over one-fifth of the votes in this year’s elections, making it the third largest party. But while there is no doubting that Jobbik’s deputies and leaders are given to making ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... exculpating rationale for torture before the fact. Selfless patriotism may be part of it. Sadistic self-indulgence may also be part of it. Who can say in what proportions they were mixed? A principle such as an unconditional ban on torture is tested precisely by its observance in a fear-engendering crisis. If your belief in the principle gradually ...”

“... the politics out – the usual charge against social history – but the potted histories of, say, self-sufficiency, from the Diggers to the plotlands of Essex, are no more or less prominent than her discussions of Royal Horticultural Society exams or of the reason some tulips have stripes (a virus borne by aphids not discovered until the 1920s). A house no ...”

“... Two independent teams used the refurbished Hubble to study supernovae, cataclysmic explosions from self-destructive stars that can temporarily outshine entire galaxies. Their data, first announced in 1998, reversed decades of expectations by suggesting that our universe isn’t just getting bigger; it’s getting bigger faster. To reconcile their robust ...”

“... the moment, see how it goes, maybe I’ll feel different one day …’ This sort of self-persuasion also released a horde of disgusted Scottish Lib Dems into the SNP park. Talking to some of them in Edinburgh and Glasgow, I saw that this was often their second migration. Once they had been refugees from Blairism and New Labour. Now they were in ...”

“... settlements lining the Pacific coast north of Tokyo, traditions of village or neighbourhood self-government, stretching back to a time when the feudal authorities extracted taxes collectively, are still reflected in local solidarity, particularly among older residents. Neighbourhoods in Japanese cities were once organised similarly. One can find the ...”