“... the same time, autism in its high-functioning form has also become a somewhat hopeful diagnosis. Self-designated ‘Aspies’ tout their ability to be guided by factors other than fame and fortune; to avoid the biases that muddy ‘neurotypical’ or group thinking; and to tell the forest from the trees. Asperger’s syndrome has been laid to rest in the ...”

“... as landscape, but also with life of his own order, even with life – one feels looking at the self-portrait in the Tate – operative in himself. How far Cézanne had moved from the snapshot puerilities of Manet & Cie when he could understand the dynamic intrusion to be himself. He seems to have been the first to see landscape [and portraiture, by the ...”

“... loosest of federations. This notion that Iraq is a failed state is now being replaced by growing self-confidence on the part of the Shia majority: the Iraqi state has been reborn, they insist, and belongs to them. There is an outpouring of nationalist celebration in the Iraqi media, even if it is not necessarily an accurate guide to what Iraqis actually ...”

“... uncertainty not really found in the American poets often pervades Apollinaire’s acts of poetic self-naming, even in lines seemingly brimming with confidence: ‘Je lègue à l’avenir l’histoire de Guillaume Apollinaire’ (‘I bequeath to the future the story of Guillaume Apollinaire’). He was not just fatherless but divided in his national identity ...”

“... have to explain why he thought Obama was the worst president maybe ever. To his base, it was self-evident. This was all happening while Trump was running for president, and sometimes it seemed as though the two men shared the same campaign. Rather than drain the swamp, Eric swore to ‘blow up’ Jefferson City, the state capital, while also promising ...”

“... from his context. Popularising Science has further, more serious problems: it is littered with self-aggrandising remarks; whole sections from one chapter are reproduced verbatim in another; and it follows Ronald Clark’s biography of Haldane from 1968 a little too closely, and without attribution. Dronamraju, a geneticist, is good on Haldane’s ...”

“... the ones who, in about 1912, received ten years of wars as a coming-of-age present: unambiguous, self-reliant, upright, humorous and philosophical men; weathered by a thousand hardships, and often illiterate, they are equipped with an intelligence that leaves their native simplicity intact. It was in Crete that I first came across these indestructible old ...”

“... the Arno ‘for the umpteenth time’. What she wants to grasp is the moment that her 17-year-old self understood that you don’t have to decide – you don’t have to do something, you don’t have to slip into plot. You can throw postcards into the river in a gesture that says: ‘I toss it all up into the air. I want it, but I don’t want it ...”

“... after he had finished marking an annual religious festival that demanded a period of isolation and self-denial. For Dan Hicks, curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the violence that ensued was part of ‘a much bigger event’ which he calls World War Zero, dating from the partition of Africa in 1884 to the outbreak of the First World War. In this ...”

“... middle of it all is the one really uncountable and perpetual thing: death.That poise between the self-indulgent and the threatened, shouldering aside the kiss-police and the knowledge of death and struggling to get on with the kissing, is part of the magic of Catullus. It may remind us that his (probable) lover Clodia was sister to Publius Clodius ...”

“... on the excessive weight of the state sector, and recommended a relaxation of restrictions on self-employment and small business. The liberalisations carried out by China and Vietnam in the 1980s – with the aim of creating a ‘socialist market economy’, or ‘socialist-oriented’ in Vietnam’s case – were seen as parallels for Cuba’s ...”

“... studies funded by governments and charities. The bias towards positive results has become self-perpetuating: when three-quarters or more of the papers published report positive findings, there is a strong incentive to avoid negative results, or to avoid writing them up.The worry is that scientific processes have been undermined by perverse incentives ...”

“... critics aided and abetted by the painter. But does all this matter much? He hangs well in his self-made private angst academy.Craxton wasn’t good at angst, or feuds. Baffled as well as hurt, he allowed himself to become obsessed. Natasha Spender recalled that the rupture and Freud’s attempt to ‘ruin his reputation … poisoned Johnny’s whole ...”

“... clear language allows us to laugh not only at the man’s predicament, but also at his self-importance. Poochigian translates the name Kinesias (‘Fucker’) as ‘Harden’, and has him bewail his frustration in suitably ridiculous terms:She has destroyed me! Killed me! Even worse:she got me all worked up and then just left.Oh, what I’m going ...”

“... it comes to crassness. She refers in passing to the film producer and director William Castle, a self-styled ‘master of gimmicks’ who specialised in cheerfully excessive horror movies, only to state in the next sentence that her book will concern itself with more ‘esoteric’ matters. During the 1950s, Hollywood sought to fend off the threat of ...”