“... which was brokered in 1993, brought the first intifada to an end, established limited Palestinian self-governance in parts of Gaza and the West Bank, outsourced to the new Palestinian government many of Israel’s responsibilities as an occupying power, and immunised Israel against the forms of protest to which it had previously been ...”

“... Kit Martin found a solution. He began dividing houses, starting with Gunton Park in Norfolk, into self-contained apartments that preserved the house and allowed the purchasers of two or three-bedroom maisonettes to luxuriate in extensive grounds. It became rather smart to give one’s address as The Laundry or The Old Kitchen. It is now the names of weekend ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”