“... 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 ...”

“... or to avoid her life? Is the very thoroughness of her need to turn Stevenson’s tale into a self-help book part of the problem, not the solution? The narrator’s long-suffering boyfriend, Lars, is adamant that Treasure Island is ‘a story, not a user’s manual’. But Levine’s novel asks: what can we use fictions to do for us? Stevenson’s story ...”

“... to Europe’s revolutions; genuine political reform required a much more mundane form of national self-appraisal. Yet just as he was turning his back on the radiant, noble Greeks of Winckelmann and Hölderlin, Heine saw a new side of them: he tried to imagine how the pagan gods had coped with the victory of Christ. In his essay ‘The Gods in ...”

“... occasion of “Depressive, clinically anxious feelings”.’ Another later note on his adolescent self: ‘Feet too thin and narrow and toes oddly shaped, ankles too thin, calves not muscular enough; thighs squnch out repulsively when you sit down; pecker too small or if not too small in terms of shortness too small in terms of circumference.’ Yet, as Max ...”

“... not a sonnet about a toy pony, flippantly comic and then thunderously serious? How about a plainly self-conscious, awkwardly (winkingly) rhymed Shakespearean sonnet, with a Shakespearean allusion and a Petrarchan turn (‘But no,// you are alone’)? How about an epithalamion that morphs into something like its jubilant opposite, a personal greeting to ...”

“... the Left could lose. This realisation dawned on the Left too, and it began to speak a language of self-criticism. Mamata, in the meantime, was about to forge an alliance with the Congress – the party that had once shown her the door – for the 2011 assembly elections, as, by some distance, the dominant partner. Once derided by the Left and even beaten up ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in seeing Zhukov as a great military man, a person of culture who never abandoned the project of self-education and valued education in others; who was, above all, Russian. He was ‘completely Russian by nature’, his daughter Era says, ‘loved everything Russian: land and people, music and arts, customs and food’. Maria, who embraced religion in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an end to censorship. The regimes are long gone, and so too are those noble dreams of workers’ self-management. (Who remembers that Solidarity was a trade union committed to anarcho-syndicalism?) But Applebaum is right to point out ways in which the system sabotaged itself. Totalitarian fantasies of control kept these societies in a perpetual condition of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was dead. It was Waugh’s only attempt to take up a public cause, ‘with all the pomposity and self-importance’ required, and it convinced him of ‘the fatuity of politics’ and the ‘wickedness of politicians’, who were prepared to commit any atrocity in the pursuit of power ‘if they think they can get away with it’. With the Thorpe campaign he ...”