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“... Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph in January, ‘have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands.’ On the one hand, then, the modest mayor of London. On the other, a former head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (as paraphrased by Brian Stone): ‘Only ...”

“... she said: ‘Probably.’ Internal resistance to the liberalisation of Syria is strong, born of self-interest and fear of sudden change in a country where military coups were annual events until Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970. When some Americans speak blithely of asking Lebanon to sign a peace treaty with Israel or to permit an American naval base in ...”

“... the Thor-type upward thrust of the entire being … the man or woman who is High Inside, hummingly self-aware … watching out for number one with a hundred new-born eyes.’ Krim was a downtown cat scrounging for glossy bylines who hadn’t made it and never would (one of his later essays was entitled ‘For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure ...”

“... a thick, oily and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder ...”

“... onto which analysts project their diagnosis of a crisis that is as much American as Sino-American. Self-critical American liberals see the Trump presidency as the result of the derailment of US globalisation policy, above all in relation to China: blue-collar resentment, stoked by unbalanced trade, put Trump in office. Meanwhile, Trump and his team put the ...”

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”

“... mobilisation that successfully prevented disease in low-income countries: universal lockdowns, self-isolation, masking, quarantine and tracing – by people, not apps – of all those whom sick people have been in contact with. Yet in his short video message Hancock was speaking the old language of Americans and Europeans, coming up with a tech solution ...”

“... enforceable, the adoption of the Act without Scottish consent illustrates that mechanisms based on self-restraint and mutual trust break down, with serious implications for the stability of the UK.What’s more, the UK government challenged the Scottish Parliament’s own 2018 EU Continuity Bill (which would have enabled some differentiation for Brexit in ...”

“... with the smallest historical railways-related facticle verges, perhaps deliberately, on self-parody. (On the history of dining cars: ‘A straw in the wind was the abandonment of croutons with the soup course, after the Pullman company was finally absorbed into the nationalised system in 1962.’) But Bradley is able to set his enthusiasm aside to ...”

“... does anything show quite so clearly the price it had to pay for its own machinations, cover-up and self-deception. The army lied. And once its prestige and standing had been compromised by the first lie – the wrongful accusation of Dreyfus – it became even more important for it to lie over and over again. Crushed by defeat in the war with Prussia and the ...”

“... office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be ...”

“... the efforts of some of the Founding Fathers, but penal codes were dramatically revised and made self-consciously less bloody than those of the mother country. The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ is another sign of the Founding Fathers’ commitment to the idea that a new sort of liberal polity demanded ...”

“... Levertov found something chilling about her command on the page, an ugliness in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems … She ...”

“... downward thrust of Asian Communism’ detected by the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies). That Communism was somehow involved in the war was not news, but out of politeness I wrote ‘Munich?’ in my notebook. Already shopworn by 1966, the Munich analogy never dies. It puts Hitler on the other side. Attleboro produced impressive ...”

“... Here is the Conservative chancellor, George Osborne: We choose aspiration. This budget backs the self-employed, the small business owner and the homebuyer. We choose families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants ...”