“... principally – but she was also more circumspect than everything that was said about her lack of self-control suggests. An essay about marriage in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, entitled ‘A Woman and Her Master’, was most probably written by her, but prudently signed ‘A Woman’. And when she wanted to publish her views about religion, she accepted ...”

“... other. After their mother’s early death in 1799, they seem to have become inseparable and too self-sufficient perhaps to feel the need of husbands. The earliest of the rare occasions on which Losh’s own voice can be heard comes much later, in the extracts copied by Lonsdale from her travel journals. They record her impressions of Italy, where she went ...”

“... emerging which wanted to rescind the civil equality of the Jews, granted in 1871. Rathenau’s self-identification as a Jew is justification enough for the inclusion of this excellent brief biography by Shulamit Volkov, the leading Israeli historian of German Jewry and German anti-semitism, in Yale’s ‘Jewish Lives’ series. Volkov has made good use of ...”

“... his son to plague he could have, but he chose instead to write about the death of his son in self-aggrandising terms, as having lost his ‘best piece of poetry’. I’m curious how Gilman would fit into his narrative the revelation in the updated Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that Jonson, who was ‘likely to have fathered other ...”

“... libraries and archives; their unique systems of tutorial teaching, collegiate organisation and self-government; and the academic prestige accumulated by two dozen generations of scholars, philosophers, scientists, poets and prime ministers. Their competitors cannot produce these things at any price, much less one that undercuts theirs. And because the ...”

“... held out against the odds in our “Finest Hour”, the British risk falling into a state of self-delusion which tells them that their institutions are above compare, that their country is somehow eternal.’ The English ‘in particular are blissfully unaware that the disintegration of the United Kingdom began in 1922, and will probably ...”

“... after the surrender of Moscow was ‘vibrant and sincere’. It was also eccentric, unfocused and self-serving. Rather than embracing the officious and ceremonial Orthodox tradition in whose name he claimed to speak, Alexander succumbed to a sequence of enthusiasms: table-shaking spiritualism, Pietist mysticism, pan-Christian ecumenism and eventually, at the ...”

“... and military dictatorship.’ The young Marxist intellectual John Cornford was rather more self-possessed: ‘I came out with the intention of staying a few days, firing a few shots, and then coming home. It sounded fine, but you just can’t do things like that. You can’t play at civil war, or fight with a reservation you don’t mean to get ...”

“... and, even if they’re not, a significant proportion of the voting population will agree with that self-evaluation. Lubbers traces the career of a spy working for the intelligence firm Hakluyt (the firm Neil Heywood advised before he was murdered in China in 2011). Over a period of two decades, Manfred Schlickenrieder spied on revolutionary groups throughout ...”

“... attached to them, that always most occupies her, and she’s hard on herself, relentlessly self-critical, from the outset: ‘This story seems to me to lack coherence and sharpness,’ she writes of the unpublished ‘Rose Eagle’, really no more than a draft, in 1913. ‘It’s like eating a bunch of grapes instead of caviar … I have a pretty bad ...”

“... own sanity,’ Edith Walton said in the New York Times Book Review. Inverted clichés come to seem self-evidently true; rich people, for instance, ‘want to be liked for their money too, and not only for themselves’. Characters give extremely explicit accounts of their own qualities and motives, which then often seem to have no connection with their actual ...”

“... the sake of the country’ was over, the volunteers went back to their books or banks in a haze of self-congratulation, surely agreeing with the newspaper that proclaimed: ‘Truly, we are an amazing people.’ There is at once something admirable and terrible about the mindset revealed in this episode. On the one hand, volunteers showed a level of ...”

“... high vocation. Both do justice to his enormous talents, and both draw attention to the excessive self-confidence that led him at times to overestimate his own prowess as a negotiator, though Ventresca also stresses Pacelli’s contrasting proneness to bouts of chronic indecision. Both believe him to have been a great pope, while recognising that his choice ...”

“... rarely fully admit to themselves or others the degree to which they rely on secondary and self-interested sources. The problem is compounded because people caught up in newsworthy events often convince themselves that they know more than they do. Survivors of suicide bombings in Baghdad would describe to me in minute detail the bomber’s facial ...”

“... about the truest form of Christian worship, his advice was clear: ‘search the scriptures thy self,’ he said, with ‘constant meditation upon what thou readest, & earnest prayer to God to enlighten thine understanding’. He was convinced the Bible was, essentially, a sacred text, and he sought to honour his maker by studying it closely, every ...”