It has not, so far, evidently suffered economically from this self-imposed isolation.

ECONOMIST: Christoph Blocher, ascendant Swiss populist

Serbia, for its part, has to choose if it wants to stay on the democratic path or head into self-imposed isolation, officials say.

ECONOMIST: Enlargement enriches old as well as new members

But if I'm honest with myself, my self-imposed isolation from other moms has left me feeling a little alone in the new-mommy experience.

CNN: A kind of courtship: Finding a mom friend in the big city

Yet a visit to his parents back home, where his mother reveals the self-imposed isolation of his youth, suggests the high price that his enduring work has exacted from him.

NEWYORKER: Wild Man Blues

Only very gradually has his successor, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, begun to make moves to release the country from its self-imposed, Soviet-style isolation.

ECONOMIST: Glimmers of light in a murky state