“... you’re lucky, if you get another one and take the right medication you’ll be back to your old self again. But with the brain, the one you were born with either works or it goes wrong and you start sliding away from yourself. Even if a better, cleverer brain – a brainier brain – had been available for transplant I wouldn’t have traded in the addled ...”

“... on the conversation to make a joke or say something smart. Then I go home covered with a layer of self-disgust as if I’d been rolling in donkey shit, and for a day or two afterwards, I stay in bed with the covers over my head in shame. In public and prescribed ritual, I have no easy get-out, but I can’t just get on with it. The only way I can manage ...”

“... has long had an agenda for court sermons, which under his leadership have become almost a self-sufficient literary category. His important book of 1998, Sermons at Court, centred not on the timeless components of Christian teaching, which preachers pass down to one another across the generations, but on the relations of the pulpit to current political ...”

“... memory you’ll find, fumbling,/A glove to the elbow that unlocks/A Petersburg night’). She is self-dramatising in 1960’s Liebeslieder Walzer (the Violette Verdy role) and dreaming her destiny in 1977’s Vienna Waltzes (the ‘Rosenkavalier’ movement). Kendall shows us that this girl was born in Valse Triste – the haunted solo that Ivanova worked on ...”

“... win power is likely to present himself in the best of lights, or at least suppress any awkward self-knowledge he may happen to possess. But the early facts are beguiling. Bob first saw Eth when she was dancing in a theatre in the Cumbrian port of Workington in 1940. He and two of his shipmates had come ashore and drunk enough to give them the courage to ...”

“... after a period of being unable to get his projects approved. But even though he made a public self-criticism of his ‘mistakes’, the film was banned by the bosses at Mosfilm and subsequently destroyed. He was able to redeem himself only by making a 13th-century epic with obvious 20th-century resonance, as Nevsky defends the soil of Rus from invading ...”

“... and often bitter, though William found happiness in marriage and Caroline aged into pride and self-reliance. Humphry Davy, the other central figure in this book, makes an equally powerful impression. Holmes sketches the state of chemistry at the time of Davy’s entrance to the field, reminding us how very recently Lavoisier had shown water to be not (as ...”

“... acted out of genuine religious conviction. This may be so, but converting was also a gesture of self-determination: a way for Schoenberg to distance himself from Judaism without joining the Viennese cultural mainstream. Post-conversion, Schoenberg became more confident as a composer. His string sextet Verklärte Nacht, still his most popular work, was more ...”

“... microcosm and macrocosm, dream and reality. Though he once confessed himself ‘a poet, self-declared, manqué’, he held to a heroic view of his vocation. ‘I make poetry as other men make war or make love or make states or revolutions,’ he wrote, ‘to exercise my faculties at large.’ In The Opening of the Field’s ‘Under Ground’, he ...”

“... classicism – and thus an artist working within a tradition – Duncan, American-born, mostly self-taught, was attempting to take dance back to its unleavened beginnings in Arcadian pastures and temples, to give it a fresh start, a place of dignity in the pantheon of high art. She drew stylistic guidance for her new language of movement from ...”

“... embrace? I have already suggested that he is Rose’s guide to the velleities of the shifting self, but we see now that he is also the great scholar of unmasterly reason. He shares the honours with Freud – ‘it is almost impossible to tell them apart’ – but Rose says he is ‘always one step ahead’ of Freud when it comes to ‘the logic of ...”

“... and its values and, not least, on financial rectitude and political stability. Neo-fascist and self-styled ‘post-fascist’ political groupings have played a full part in the manoeuvrings and mergers that have characterised Italian politics over the past two decades, moderating their policies and rhetoric where necessary in order to obtain a share in ...”

“... skills and – while we’re at it – charisma. His primary (possibly only) asset is his self-styled image as cosmopolitan intellectual: liberal, secular, rational, modern, he stands for the way the West – along with many of the country’s middle-class urbanites – wishes to see Egypt. Second among the triumvirate is Amr Moussa, Egypt’s former ...”

“... that comes across like this is Tony Blair’s, which was also so disconnected, erratic and self-referential that it had the unmistakeable ring of authenticity. Blair jumped from subject to subject in such a peculiar way that it had to be the way his mind really worked. Interestingly, both books have sold far better than anyone expected, especially ...”

“... the Japanese Empire built regional economic blocs in the name of the fashionable ideal of national self-sufficiency, while Britain established a system of exclusionary and preferential trade with its colonies and dominions. In the early years of World War Two, when Allied and Axis planners both began to imagine what the postwar world might look like, the ...”