“... unmistakable) changes of expression. Simon says Marlo represents ‘that strange combination of self-love and self-loathing that rarely dares speak its name openly’. This makes sense, and Simon should know. But it isn’t quite what we see. What we see is a man who is wary but confident; elegant; not cruel, merely (from ...”

“... prohibition of recourse to international force (Article 2(4)) by states except in circumstances of self-defence, which itself was restricted to responses to a prior ‘armed attack’ (Article 51), and only then until the Security Council had the chance to review the claim. The ban on wars of aggression, and the strict control even of wars of ...”

“... after going back to full-time drinking in the wake of his wife’s death in 1954.) But Marlowe is self-conscious about his narratorial duties from the start. He keeps close watch on his similes: ‘I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it,’ he says in The Big Sleep after likening a woman’s voice to ‘bells in a doll’s house’. On occasion ...”

“... love,’ as the motto of the Russian muzhik, a real man, goes. Immigration is a splitting of the self. But it’s also a premature schism in the most important union. If Shteyngart’s memoir is a love story between him and his parents – and it is – this is where the marriage hits the rocks. The young lovers grow apart. They want other things. They ...”

“... any sugar plantations in the Caribbean, cotton mills in Manchester, parlour-maids, benefactors or self-martyring subservient spouses: times have changed. Writing – particularly the writing of novels – requires the twin privileges of time and money, and if you haven’t got them you are almost certainly doomed to failure, ground down by the exigencies of ...”

“... written late at night, but in the morning she found her angry emotions had vanished. Her waking self was devoted to the image that their marriage was strong. Natasha at three in the morning was an entirely different person from Natasha at breakfast. She asked herself: are the late night entries the faithful ones, or those I write during the day? From the ...”

“... as he has lost the courage of his convictions. It’s clear that he never had the political self-confidence to impose his authority on the neo-Blairites who surround him. Nonetheless, Labour’s problems aren’t all the doing of the leadership. Equally responsible are the external circumstances that are in the process of reshaping the British political ...”

“... obeys a compulsion that will not relent. In the lines of his face are buried layer on layer of self-distrust and disappointment. He had a late start in movies – his first noticeable role came at the age of 34 – but he entered with the air of a veteran because he had grown up a close observer of the men who ran things. His father, Timothy, was a ...”

“... he was going to go and be a hermit for a while: ‘Are you looking for God or looking for your self? she said. Can you even tell the difference any more? … Six years, she said, it’s been six years, and you leave now, at the worst time there could be, and for nothing … You are a child, she said, you always have been, and now I have two ...”

“... era who directly challenged white privilege by supporting equal citizenship rights and colonial self-determination. All were, as the historian of anthropology George Stocking put it, ‘evolutionists’: that is, they assimilated ‘races’ to ‘stages’ of the human evolutionary past, and then assumed each had to develop separately and at its own ...”

“... to underpin political independence. They boasted that they had done more in a few years to achieve self-determination thanks to oil than in decades of fighting with Kalashnikovs. The failure of this dream was sudden and almost total. In 2014 the Kurds came under attack from Islamic State and the price of oil fell. The peshmerga fled even faster than the Iraqi ...”

“... school of belief in benevolent empire, among them Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, with their self-serving fairy tales about a post-Vietnam US internationalism organised around ‘complexity’, ‘interdependence’, ‘regime theory’ and ‘liberal institutionalism’. But his main focus is Gramsci, who as general secretary of the PCI was interned by ...”

“... and the best that the ‘dilapidated dukes’ could do was delay implementation for two years. Self-government for Ireland was guaranteed to become law in September 1914.Unfortunately, many unionists, particularly within Ulster, were adamantly opposed to Home Rule, and politicians couldn’t agree on how to allay their fears. This was the backdrop to the ...”

“... to the idea that electing more Indian MPs to Westminster was the most effective way to secure self-government in India. Without taking into account this ‘great man’ view of history, the logic behind Naoroji’s tactics remains slightly obscure, as it does in Patel’s account. Naoroji had to forge a career at a time when Indians were barred from most ...”

“... examination, prove ever so slightly asymmetrical and as such bear some relation to life. As a self-confessed ‘public transport enthusiast’, he would also doubtless pause to consider the modern equivalent of the gig-lamp (if indeed it is equivalent), the headlamp, as seen on buses, trams, cars, lorries etc, and to measure its kind of symmetry, which ...”