“... consulted various people in an attempt to understand his experiences, he performs – slightly self-consciously – a cleansing ceremony with his ex-wife, wafting burning sage around the house. With his new girlfriend he also gives the house a lick of paint and replaces window frames and floorboards. This seems to stop the slugs and rats getting in. And it ...”

“... of them well educated and middle class, was attracting large audiences by emphasising aspiration, self-betterment and respectability. In what seems to have been a wildly misguided effort to be taken seriously again, Wedderburn published a pamphlet arguing that permitting enslaved labourers to purchase their own freedom over time was preferable to immediate ...”

“... with one side or the other faced clear choices, and there were very few of these.’ Fear was self-perpetuating, and only once its overriding cause – the political vacuum at the top – was removed, could the wars end. It was not until 1509, when the first Tudor king, Henry VII, was unquestioningly succeeded by the second, Henry VIII, that the country ...”

“... training programme, which aimed to dissolve the false persona and release the initiate’s true self. In the 1940s, Carl Jung co-opted spiritual alchemy as a metaphor for ‘individuation’: the repressed, mercurial unconscious would combine with the dominant, sulphuric consciousness to produce a unified self.It’s ...”

“... mountains by Hungarian motorcycle fiends. Fiume, the Whitehead Torpedo Factory: origin of the self-propelled torpedoes that armed the US navy. Pynchon shows the way ripples from the political earthquake in Berlin are felt in the bowling alleys of Milwaukee, and the music sung in a Chicago cocktail lounge is received and remodulated in a nightclub on the ...”

“... of the few animals – along with great apes, dolphins and elephants – able to pass the mirror self-recognition test. If you mark a pigeon’s wing and let it look in a mirror it will try to remove the mark, realising that what it sees is a reflected image of its own body. Pigeons can recognise video footage of themselves shown with a five-second delay ...”

“... is a thief trafficking in breath’), political and geopolitical commentary, and oddly intimate self-exposure, with a terrifying appendix called ‘Reining in the Arctic’. Alastair Campbell blurbs it as ‘a proper piece of journalism’ – which says it all, since the book flatters security wonks without disturbing anyone’s received wisdom. It is ...”

“... a manner shaped for other purposes by the Augustan satirists, urbanely interventionist rather than self-effacing, and designed to indicate authorial management rather than to induce an illusion of unprocessed reality. This is even true of Shamela, which is written in Richardson’s letter-form and thus ostensibly cuts out the author. It is an example of a ...”

“... Security (Incapacity for Work) Bill, which comes into force this year. This system will use a self-assessment form – a singularly inappropriate method – to work out eligibility for the slightly higher benefit available to the mentally and physically disabled, but will judge psychological incapacity on what the MHF describes as ‘strikingly more ...”

“... we are told, ‘to be one of the “few” Jewish reprisals ... after years of almost unbelievable self-restraint.’ In fact, there was no ‘British investigation’, and the comment about ‘self-restraint’ was made by a British politician in 1939: as the massacre occurred in 1948, it is unlikely that he had Deir Yassin ...”

“... century, included the history and the geography as well as the literature and the language of this self-conscious and consciously taught nation. In the universities, the major humane interests were still to be satisfied in Classics, which had also its own strict linguistic disciplines running through from the private schools. English, in that university ...”

“... in any of these three conditions means, straightforwardly, diminution of the chances of democratic self-determination. In Britain, the block vote in the Labour Party provides a notorious instance of the first; the corporate finance and tycoon press of the Conservative Party a flagrant example of the second. But uniting the two parties is their exploitation of ...”

“... were in their dying phases and both Armenians and Azerbaijanis discovered the idea of national self-determination’. Since then, dubious historical narratives and the jargon of 19th-century nationalism have been deployed to reinforce a mutual antipathy.Nagorno-Karabakh​ – Nagorny, Russian for ‘mountainous’; Kara-Bakh, Turkish for ‘black ...”

“... Joan Bakewell said when I asked her about him. ‘And sexually many of those men lived in a self-contained culture.’ Bakewell was working as a studio manager in those days and she saw how available and how willing many of the young people were. ‘People were at the top of their form and many were jubilantly having affairs,’ she says. ‘The ...”

“... his journals, which Segev quotes at length, he revealed ‘a capacity for sensitive and courageous self-examination and a willingness to undertake it’. He knew that the national salvation he promised his people spelled national destruction for another. He had little compassion for those who stood in the way of his ambitions: the Palestinians, above all, but ...”