“... revolutionaries. Trotsky went on with his Black Sea holiday. The chance was missed. Abkhazians are self-critical about their own habit of missing chances. The ethnic Abkhaz, now numbering about eighty thousand, have lived as a well-fed village people, and the stresses of urban hard graft have never attracted them. In Sukhum, the young prefer to drink coffee ...”

“... to be considered a form of action, he insisted – except it didn’t satisfy. The strictures of self-imposed poverty and chastity were not enough to convince him of his martyrdom. In her essay Lucy Riall shows how determinedly Mazzini publicised the military achievements of Garibaldi on behalf of liberal causes in South America, projecting him as the ...”

“... as a painter offers me finds its best place in the situationist movement,’ Jorn writes in a self-critique of masochistic generosity, ‘even if the same movement is obliged to attack me so as to attack a situation from which I cannot escape, but which disrupts the movement.’ Yet Debord is hardly the show-trialling and Gulag-sentencing Situ-Stalinist ...”

“... story is the way she transforms her hero’s resistance to his religious destiny into a series of self-inflicted punishments that rival those suffered by early Christian saints at the hands of their persecutors. He fills his shoes with stones, blinds himself with quicklime, winds barbed wire around his torso. His landlady, who hopes, for some obscure ...”

“... is one of the elements of Byatt’s knowingly archival Victorianism (she has used the phrase ‘self-conscious realism’). This may involve not only telling characters what they don’t know, but how they don’t think. A little later in The Children’s Book, Philip Warren is walking on Romney Marsh, towards his favourite church, St Thomas Becket. He ...”

“... colonised, wracked by a terrible fear of revealing his ‘inferiority’ to whites, prone to self-hatred and always ready to imagine a slight. Worse still, Mbeki was only an extreme example of a general tendency: the incoming African political elite may have espoused universal values and human rights, but the racial prejudice of this aspirant national ...”

“... I stretched out my arms – and lost sight of my own fingers.’ The coming apart of the social self is accompanied by imagery of bodies being destroyed and returned to nature. There are stories from other refugees of children tortured to death by having their eyes gouged out, executions where the victims’ mouths and noses were filled with dirt until they ...”

“... each musician in his 14-piece ensemble to be a soloist – did not exist as a score but as a self-assembly kit consisting of loose-leaf instrumental parts, including a part for a conductor whose arms rotated like the hands of a clock, but whose movements had no bearing on the sound produced by the players. Each performance was different: Cage said he ...”

“... Démocratique (MoDem). Bayrou decided last month to jettison his candidature in an ‘act of self-denial’ to boost the chances of a centrist presidency: Macron’s. Bayrou is a stolid figure with a stolid following: in Houellebecq’s novel Soumission Bayrou is the perfect choice after the Islamist candidate wins the French presidency in 2022 and casts ...”

“... his own prize specimen. Mr Common Decency, it seemed, was capable of a level of performative self-neglect worthy of New York’s erstwhile Dada punk-queen, the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven. In the final pages of his book, Sutherland returns to ‘How the Poor Die’, and to the stink of ‘natural’ death. Is that what Orwell, in his last ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in an attempt to find a legal justification, offers an opportunity to explore the inquiry’s self-restraint.In his introductory words Chilcot explains that the inquiry ‘has not expressed a view on whether military action was legal’. With no lawyer among its members, and no legal counsel to assist it, the inquiry chose to sidestep this delicate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and agency), but the tense sociology of difference: yeomen, gentlemen farmers, intellectuals and self-made businessmen vie to win the hand, or control the fate of Hardy’s female protagonists. These novels anxiously aspire to a world in which such difference might melt away, a place often glimpsed only beyond the limits of the plot. While the men are ...”

“... descriptions of the stable, fixed person appears to call into question the existence of a self, understood non-relationally.’ Family history, biology, social context – all these things, important in traditional approaches, dwindle almost to nothing in travel psychology. Desire remains the motivator, but ‘Where to?’ replaces the question of ...”