“... win back her favour. The letter displays Ralegh at his best and worst. It’s a monstrous blast of self-pity, tempered by his characteristic half-belief in his own unrealistic fantasies: My hart was never broken till this day that I here the Queen goes away so farr off whom I have followed so many yeares with so great love and desire, in so many jurneys, and ...”

“... had managed to ensure that 84 per cent of its profits came to Britain. In 1933, Reza Khan, a self-educated soldier who had made use of the postwar chaos to grab power and found a new ruling dynasty (much to Mossadegh’s disgust), negotiated a new agreement with APOC, which turned out to be remarkably like the old one. During the Second World ...”

“... in communal, single-sex accommodation, just like soldiers in a regular army. Filled with ideas of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, they did as they were told. (The celibacy rule is to this day so tightly enforced that there are separate times for men and women to use Camp Ashraf’s petrol station.) Members were urged to transfer their passions from their former ...”

“... intimacy is part of the healing quality of IT for a soldier in a remote posting. It’s also the self-evident solution to his moral quandary. He explains to Lamo that he’s seen ‘awful things’ on ‘classified networks’, ‘incredible things … things that [belong] in the public domain … things that would have an impact on 6.7 billion ...”

“... 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 ...”