“... and tailored’ strike (a characteristic Obama phrase) which would also exact a painful toll? This self-contradictory presentation was partly owing to another of the forces urging American ‘punishment’, namely the advocates of humanitarian war, and chief among them the president’s national security adviser, Susan Rice. Her stance differs very little 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of it is extremely funny, most of the time on purpose, as it plots its antihero’s cynical and self-serving efforts to tackle climate change over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at ...”

“... Fairness stands at some remove from social utility, and more remote still are concerns about the self-respect of the individual. These incommensurables complicate the discussion of responsibility, though not, of course, among practising politicians. Furthermore, Brown notes that philosophers distinguish carefully between ‘brute luck’ (over which nobody ...”

“... founded, in 1951, on just such an ‘as if’, with critics writing as if films – not just self-evidently artistic statements, but also seemingly disposable Hollywood genre movies – could be taken as seriously as classical tragedy. And by doing so, these critics proved it was so. They wrote as if Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray et al ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Genealogy of Morality – but rather that the ‘English psychologists’ appear to be driven by self-loathing. Under the cover of cool empiricism lies a ‘secret, malicious … instinct to belittle humans’, or a disillusioned idealism, or maybe just ‘a bit of everything, a bit of vulgarity, a bit of gloominess, a bit of hostility to Christianity, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for another push against the system. Penal colonisation has given way to ‘independent’ self-colonisation. Keneally points out that the 1999 referendum on the monarchy turned into a popular revolt against the system of two-party professional politicos. Neither old nor new immigrants could stand the idea that they (and not ordinary voters) would ...”

“... or Jessica Mitford. The world might have seemed less pressing, and more adaptable to her invented self. Having a bad character can also mean being at home with one’s true predicament. It is taken for granted in the posh style, and certainly by the Mitford girls, that one is not necessarily very nice and that not being nice need not be the end of the ...”

“... is the biography of his style. Yet style is a manifestation of much more than a writer’s own self-fashioning: it speaks of the places he has been and is coloured by what happened there, and in that way comes to define the rhythms of his prose and the patterns of his belief. A biography of Hemingway’s style will amount to nothing if it can’t exhume ...”

“... with beliefs which, unknown or rejected in earlier centuries, had come to be taken for granted, as self-evident truths’. Of course popular beliefs had to fall into line with the bureaucracy’s position, and Cohn provides plenty of examples to show that they did: rural and small-town societies were rich in resentments, ancestral curses and fears of the ...”

“... lists are clearly grounded in the general dynamics of today’s global capitalism. This link is self-evident in the case of ecological problems and the poverty gap between North and South. Is the rise of Islamism not conditioned by the refusal of Muslim civilisation to accept the social dynamics of capitalism? Is the strange turn in China not to do with the ...”