“... patriotic loyalty runs out. By 1066 the long-suffering English population had had eighty years of self-interested squabbling among their ruling classes. It wasn’t just Æthelred’s mother who must have ‘look[ed] on with dismay’ at this. One might say of Hastings, as the chronicler said of Ulfcytel’s battle in 1004: ‘If [the home team] had been up ...”

“... for her ‘quick-coming millennium’, warning that the ‘cold truth’ might eventually dawn on self-sacrificing idealists that ‘the people thank them not.’ Daniell responded with fervour, but Baillie, another of Rowbotham’s rebellious six, was undaunted, filling Liberty with his thoughts on Proudhon and Kropotkin. ‘They had all turned their backs ...”

“... Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, Charlotte Mew and Penelope Fitzgerald. All unflinching, elliptical, self-disguising. King quotes well from a terrific essay in which Bainbridge describes the surprise she got when she attended her brother’s funeral. She hadn’t realised he had been a coroner. So: they did, after all, have something in common. They both had ...”

“... taken over from locomotives as Platonov’s favourite metaphor. The upbeat mood and recovering self-confidence remains dominant in his wartime letters, even in the face of his son’s death in Ufa in January 1943. Platonov had been rehabilitated as a writer, at least for the time being, publishing sketches of army life and planning larger-scale work when ...”

“... house, in the rose-garden, their younger daughter, seven-year-old Perdita, strange, mysterious and self-absorbed as usual, was beheading a litter of puppies with unexpectedly muscular and adult twists of her slender arms. Her cap of golden hair shone like burnished auburn on her head.’ Bradbury does capture something. Occasional whiffs of Walter ...”

“... a united island. If this is the outcome of Brexit for Northern Ireland, it will be a curious, self-inflicted defeat for the unionist community. Among the province’s political parties, only the DUP supported the Leave campaign. The Tories’ new ‘friends and allies’ gained influence after the Good Friday Agreement, which split the Ulster Unionist ...”

“... on the coast at Lyme Regis were instrumental in the development of palaeontology. Anning’s self-taught expertise, her subtle interpretation of fossils, and her many notable discoveries (including the ichthyosaur) made her one of the first authorities in the nascent discipline. But as a woman she couldn’t join the Geological Society of London and De ...”

“... to biographers, but it’s difficult not to read one of her earliest poems, ‘Lament’, as a self-epitaph in the tradition of Villon, Corbière and her fictional contemporary Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: I am an exiled king without his crown, A dying poet with a tattered mask, A starving beggar who may nothing ask, And a religion that has been cast ...”

“... of him, Phillips’s friends and associates are less careful, describing him as a bombastic, self-congratulatory boor and ‘full of shit’ when he’d ‘had a few’, which was often. The book is long, and the last third of it, like Phillips’s life, is much less interesting than the rest. Phillips enjoyed himself in later life, driving around ...”

“... also called distinguished medical witnesses who testified that his condition had robbed him of all self-control, amounting to an impulse ‘so strong that nothing short of a physical impossibility would prevent him from performing an act which his delusion might compel him to do’. The jury found McNaughton not guilty on grounds of insanity, and he was ...”

“... which she asked White to put in his rubbish bin’ and then spent the meal bragging about her self-sufficiency.Born in 1902 in a suburb of Sydney, she grew up in a home similar to the one she would describe in The Man Who Loved Children. Her mother died when she was very young and she lived in the chaotic, messy household of her father and his second ...”

“... they represent.’ An ideal narrative is one that doesn’t need to describe a world: it’s a self-contained system. But the version of the story that is told in The Idiot ends in disaster! All the characters are happily married off, and gaze into one another’s eyes as a solar eclipse becomes visible in the Siberian east. Selin is appalled. That sort of ...”

“... Leaked internal emails from Sony Pictures in 2014 showed in detail how Hollywood studios exercise self-censorship, trying to guess what Chinese censors might not like and altering or cutting scenes. An attack by aliens on the Great Wall in the original version of Pixels (2015) was carefully excised, in order not to upset the censor. In recent years, more ...”

“... Kotkin has no real answer. He concedes that Stalin may well have wanted to get rid of ‘evasive, self-serving’ bureaucrats and replace tired, ill-educated Old Bolsheviks with young promotees with better education, but, as Kotkin rightly points out, ‘Stalin faced no imperative to murder them. He could sack or transfer any local satrap at will.’ He does ...”

“... al-Omar oilfield, the largest in the country. Turkey was never going to accept any form of Kurdish self-determination in Syria, though the Kurds argue that they are only asking for a federal system in which they have a high degree of autonomy – not independence. Turkey has long wanted to intervene militarily in Syria, but so long as the US and Russia opposed ...”