“... only state where I saw a sign reading ‘Trump Country’), the strenuous empathy, the ritual self-flagellation, the extreme vocal kabuki were easy to hear as an ongoing provocation to anyone not fully on board with the programme. I couldn’t turn from that relentless decorousness to the resentment and paranoia on offer at other frequencies without ...”

“... financially, and – in terms of the poetry – everybody was imitating everybody else. A sort of self-parodying was going on, and it had become a bit ridiculous. And the combative side of things had become marooned; by then our little war had been lost, the encroaching barbarians and popsters were now getting mainstream attention, publicised all over the ...”

“... her mother and aunt taught her, she sewed and embroidered diligently for both her sanity and her self-preservation.’ After she left the tower, people called her ‘the new Antigone’, but perhaps ‘the new Penelope’ would have been more apt. She did not bring to her needlework the hatred of the tricoteuses; she was not a vicious woman, except where the ...”

“... are, the process of oil painting appears to have made Brainard aware that he lacked a certain self-belief, or egotism, a quality which painters determined at all costs to be great seemed to him to share. He feared he hadn’t sufficient ‘patience’, as he put it in a letter to Fairfield Porter of 1972, to do justice to the ‘authority oils carry for ...”

“... who were starting to take package trips to Benidorm instead – we, like the rest of the hardy self-improving lower middle classes, were bound for places where farmhouse bed and breakfasts cowered beneath looming ridges of wet, windswept heather, where there were ample supplies of fiddle music, and where every fishing village and handicrafts exhibition ...”

“... revolutionaries. Trotsky went on with his Black Sea holiday. The chance was missed. Abkhazians are self-critical about their own habit of missing chances. The ethnic Abkhaz, now numbering about eighty thousand, have lived as a well-fed village people, and the stresses of urban hard graft have never attracted them. In Sukhum, the young prefer to drink coffee ...”

“... to be considered a form of action, he insisted – except it didn’t satisfy. The strictures of self-imposed poverty and chastity were not enough to convince him of his martyrdom. In her essay Lucy Riall shows how determinedly Mazzini publicised the military achievements of Garibaldi on behalf of liberal causes in South America, projecting him as the ...”

“... as a painter offers me finds its best place in the situationist movement,’ Jorn writes in a self-critique of masochistic generosity, ‘even if the same movement is obliged to attack me so as to attack a situation from which I cannot escape, but which disrupts the movement.’ Yet Debord is hardly the show-trialling and Gulag-sentencing Situ-Stalinist ...”

“... As Obama’s speeches have won countless new admirers, it’s just more evidence of how eager self-selected opinion-formers are to be sweet-talked, not of how ordinary people are likely to vote. As Clinton has shifted her ground and the basis of her campaign, from heir presumptive to picked-on woman to plucky and indefatigable underdog, it’s evidence of ...”

“... was something Muggleton brought to the original Reeveite revelation, saving the sect from the un-self-fulfilling fate of failed prophecy, that scene on the mountain top in Beyond the Fringe. But the death of Oliver Cromwell, the collapse of the English republic, and the restoration of the monarchy also helped. In the 1660s it was no longer either credible or ...”

“... is one of the elements of Byatt’s knowingly archival Victorianism (she has used the phrase ‘self-conscious realism’). This may involve not only telling characters what they don’t know, but how they don’t think. A little later in The Children’s Book, Philip Warren is walking on Romney Marsh, towards his favourite church, St Thomas Becket. He ...”

“... colonised, wracked by a terrible fear of revealing his ‘inferiority’ to whites, prone to self-hatred and always ready to imagine a slight. Worse still, Mbeki was only an extreme example of a general tendency: the incoming African political elite may have espoused universal values and human rights, but the racial prejudice of this aspirant national ...”

“... story is the way she transforms her hero’s resistance to his religious destiny into a series of self-inflicted punishments that rival those suffered by early Christian saints at the hands of their persecutors. He fills his shoes with stones, blinds himself with quicklime, winds barbed wire around his torso. His landlady, who hopes, for some obscure ...”

“... for a million-person march in Bangkok. With Thaksin gone, his supporters have formed their own self-sustaining networks, which will probably survive even if he is no longer able to fund them. From exile, Thaksin promises: ‘I haven’t received justice and I will not give up.’Thailand’s globalised economy may lead to even greater inequality between ...”

“... view,’ McBride writes, ‘the penal code permitted the Ascendancy to admire its own confident self-portrait, undisturbed by the continuing challenge posed by the resilience of the majority faith in Ireland’. His aim is to counterpoint Ascendancy pomp and complaint with a portrait of, on the one hand, the resilience of Catholic life and, on the ...”