“... 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 ...”

“... presumably, be already sufficiently disconcerted to learn of the means chosen by Queen Anna to self-administer an abortion in 1603 without needing to translate ‘scho had gottin sum balme watter, whilk haistnit hir abort’. Similarly, the young Elizabeth’s description of her wigs as ‘pykit vyr, coverit vith heir, to ver on my head’ jars with ...”

“... is drained of the capacity to love: he is ‘Pericles of Tired’, exhausted, off the pace, self-loathing (‘the sound of his own voice in his ears saying stuff disgusts him’). Like Shakespeare’s prince, Richard has lost his wife and daughter, but he has conversations in his head with the child he last saw thirty years ago. He asks her about ...”

“... adrift with her two children, evoked in the wastes of Aftermath. The memoir was criticised for self-pity: here anger has taken up all the space where pity might cling on. The production – and the text – set aside the restless to and fro debate and shared anguish about the depths of human suffering and especially women’s sufferings that keeps ...”

“... front – for that is increasingly the common sense of many economists and others, including the self-declared democratic socialist Bernie Sanders – but in his desire to change foreign policy. His criticism of the absurdly high level of military expenditure is echoed by some prominent US economists in relation to their own country. Joseph Stiglitz (a ...”

“... What if the Habsburg Empire formed a true community of sentiment, and even became a vehicle for self-determination, just as much as the nation-states that replaced it? That is the provocative argument of Pieter Judson’s history. To accept the idea that only ethnic nations can elicit the devotion of their members, Judson argues, is to buy into a ...”

“... its destruction. This would hardly be a new project, but Lamartine approached it with the immense self-confidence of a man who has seen that a fine speech before a turbulent parliament can alter the course of history. Even so, his story is also always aware of practicalities – money, travel arrangements, and social proprieties. An American visitor to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... some kind of opportunity for personal development. The pension reform wasn’t dreamed up in a self-help seminar, though. It followed earlier efforts to reshape the Russian pension system in line with Western norms. As long ago as the mid-1990s, IMF and World Bank officials had pressed the Yeltsin government to make changes, but at the time – mired in an ...”

“... one of the few still alive at the end, is 12-year-old Peter, who the author readily admitted was a self-portrait, not least in his reluctance to be a Hitler Youth. The family home is a large estate, the Georgenhof, once affluent, less so since the war began, its vistas somewhat spoiled by the housing development over the road, where a man called Drygalski, 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 ...”

“... That I’m blaspheming against a particular penis? I don’t think any mullah anywhere is going to self-identify to such an extent. And what you don’t know is that more than a few religious-minded scholars buy these paintings.’ When I asked if he’d ever had any formal training his explanation was not out of kilter with the rest of his life. ‘When I was ...”