“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... beneath two guys who have crossed their guitars together, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and combat, that powerful form of intimacy only achieved onstage in front of other people, known as male bonding.’It seems that, under the proto-slacker sarcasm, she was dead serious. She was obsessed at the time, she writes, with the way men used ...”

“... an emotional nowhere – from which Ensslin in all her craziness and vulnerability and courage and self-righteousness could then emerge, to address us, to stand opposite and laugh. The two later Oppositions, I sometimes think, are the only pictures of people done in our time that the future will care to look at – though not for long. They are Géricault’s ...”

“... Defoe – on whom Carter wrote – and Swift, both of whom excelled at similarly dense and self-reflexive images. According to Clapp, Carter liked to tell the story of her mother’s attempt to stop her from reading novels as a teenager: ‘She told me to remember what had happened to Madame Bovary.’ It is probably, as Clapp suggests, ‘too good to ...”

“... declared shortly after his death, ‘that rectitude of intention was alone a sufficient reason for self-confidence; and therefore feared nothing because he meant well.’ ‘I retain all the ignorance and [remain] under all the prejudice which influenced me,’ was his own proud response to the recommendations of a committee that urged him to end the ...”

“... unadorned Word, while Catholics such as Thomas More (as Seth Lerer shows in Error and the Academic Self) regarded Protestant texts as assemblages of error. For Grafton, correctors stand for ‘something like a new culture’, which pursued regularisation and ‘textual precision’: they were ‘a new social type’, informed by the medieval scriptorium but ...”

“... Park with George, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and is arguably the closest Sondheim has come to a self-portrait. Being a mystery, or his own puzzle, is an inextricable part of Sondheim’s art. For all the pictures it contains, Finishing the Hat doesn’t give much sense of the life Sondheim has led on or off stage. He may have had love affairs but not one ...”

“... large extent, the story of Eilis’s impressions, her reflections, her winning through to a mature self-consciousness. Tóibín’s aim is not to document 1950s Irish-American Brooklyn through Eilis’s eyes – though coincidentally he does do this. Rather, and far more interestingly, his aim is to render the inner world of Eilis Lacey. The inner world of ...”

“... of Important Energies’, who carries a lifetime’s resentment of his charismatic, self-centred father, Roger. Burt spent his childhood with a crush on his young stepmother, Lucy, and cherished a vague belief that, around his 16th birthday, he would somehow inherit her, perhaps along with his father’s Mustang fastback. But Roger has never ...”

“... who for the most part considered themselves individualists and independents. This delusion of self-sufficiency, along with the fantasy that enough water could be found to supply the region, launched the eco-tragedy now unfolding. Towards the end of his book, Powell points out that the US Bureau of Reclamation has decided not to take climate change into ...”

“... To insist that those on benefits must fill the jobs freely available ‘out there’ is self-deception. There are few jobs ‘out there’. And there will be even fewer now. I doubt that the cuts have very much to do with the economy: if they did they would have been more plausible and less risky. It is very unlikely that Osborne, if asked, could ...”

“... faces frozen in the pain of having to endure death by a thousand photos with drunken self-made men and (as it turns out) crooks. Disorganised criminals, which is to say the vast majority of those who commit crime, live in a parallel social and cultural world which only intersects with our own when we are inconvenienced by it – the stolen ...”