“... cultures and enables the monetisation of political markets. It takes a state with considerable self-confidence and financial autonomy to resist the pressures to play this game. Those that hold out against the intrusions are often unsavoury – North Korea and Burma, for instance – but there are two sides to international intervention and peacekeeping ...”

“... ways. De Gaulle was brisk and had a military manner, used to being obeyed; Mitterrand was self-confident and haughty. In the early 1990s, I interviewed a former resistance member who had known Mitterrand during the war and found him ‘terribly cold and distant’ – ‘never a true socialist’. When the two men met again in Lille in the early ...”

“... diminish in professionals who work daily with people in pain; it would, not least, be a matter of self-protection. Once​ Mr Lagnari knew he had cancer, the rate at which his pain worsened accelerated. Of course his tumour was growing, as were the metastases in his liver, but it was also his perception that he’d been invaded that quickened his pain. At ...”

“... internal decay or conquest from without, but also stunts republican virtue and denies it healthy self-propagation. In his Novanglus letters of 1774 to the Massachusetts Bay colonists, John Adams repeats the ‘saying of Machiavel no wise man ever contradicted, which has been literally verified in this province, that “while the mass of the people is not ...”

“... such as central bankers who were perceived to have an excess of control – technical control, self-control, careful attention to consequences – and handed over to those who, frankly, seem a little out of control. Contrast a figure like Bernanke, poring over speeches to decide whether it’s time to use the metaphor of a market ‘bubble’ or persist ...”

“... he took orders in 1615. Debates persist about Donne’s religion. What balance of conviction and self-interest led him to convert, and later to take orders? What kind of Protestant did he become: Calvinist? Arminian? First one then the other, changing with the times? Was Dr Donne, dean of St Paul’s, an unequivocal supporter of royal ecclesiastical ...”

“... points out, ‘all the faces suggest the same even and unruffled temper, a complete command of self coupled with a sociable ease in the presence of others’; and while certain gestures may suggest the sitters are about to speak, as a rule they appear ‘more inclined to listen’. The sitters almost never seem to speak, either, in the other genre of ...”

“... our sense of it is mostly derived from his own writings. He had an almost obsessive interest in self-portrayal. The Canzoniere is a kind of emotional autobiography; the Posteritati (‘Letter to Posterity’), which gives an account of his life up to 1351, is no less carefully tailored. As a young man he studied law in Montpellier and Bologna, but swiftly ...”

“... a close though unequal alliance. Cassiodorus’ chronicle, not an official product but a politic self-advertisement, situated the consular pair of 519 at the end of a long list of Roman rulers going back beyond Romulus to Aeneas, Latinus and the beginnings of history. It proclaimed that the Gothic dynasty was the legitimate successor to the emperors, to ...”

“... in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also vile: ‘the lowest form of animal life on the criminal scale’. This introduced a contradiction into the policing of prostitution. For officers dealing with international trafficking, the ...”

“... on the wartime national debt. The cost of empire outside India was modest, especially once self-government was granted to the settler colonies in the 1840s and 1850s, and the Indian regime paid for itself (as far as the domestic taxpayer was concerned), even after the East India Company was effectively abolished in 1858. Government and Parliament ...”

“... with organic agriculture; female members took leadership roles. The goal was to incubate self-governed Kurdish institutions within the Turkish state, resorting to violence only if their autonomy was threatened. ‘We will put Bookchin’s ideas into practice as the first society that establishes a tangible democratic confederalism,’ an anonymous ...”

“... sleaze and corruption appeared in the Telegraph. The piece lambasted ‘the deep complacency and self-serving nature of the British establishment’ and railed against the way ‘donors end up with peerages in the House of Lords’. The conclusion was damning. ‘Our problem is not really about individual politicians, nor even political parties. The problem ...”

“... fascists and Bolshevists, the feel of satin; who was dolphin-like in his movements, an obsessive self-googler before easy engines existed, who could not spell ‘tongue’ correctly on the first try. Every writer should have such a pedant – every writer should have two, returning in the evenings to commune over the crucial works, the neglected ...”

“... gave him his cards ‘for good and sufficient cause’, Keaton was stripped of everything but his self-loathing. What followed were a few unmoored years of benders and breakdowns.In 1940, Keaton Productions Inc. was dissolved; his life as a filmmaker was over. In the same year, the 21-year-old dancer Eleanor Norris became Keaton’s third wife. (His second ...”