“... that stemmed from principle, and to transform the principles of his enemies into displays of self-interest or desperation. In doing the latter he could turn out corrosive invective. One contemporary said: ‘As for his writings, there is as much difference between them and finer Invectives, as there is between a man cut with a Rasor, and spew’d ...”

“... acquired state power has been overshadowed by the extraordinary story of the rise and fall or self-transformation of the regimes inspired by the October Revolution. Within little more than 30 years of Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station, Russia had become a superpower, and one third of humanity was ruled by Communist parties. There had been nothing ...”

“... are closer to the attitude of the artist-photographer Claude Cahun, who staged a series of self-portraits in all kinds of personae, and wrote a little book of Heroines, in which Helen of Troy begins her tale: ‘I know I am very ugly, but I try to forget it. I play at being this beautiful young girl.’ When Angela Carter reworked the myth of Helen of ...”

“... The culture of torture thus encompasses both prisoners and guards. It must be hard to preserve self-control when one has suffered from or been threatened with some of the treatment one can now hand out to those assumed to be enemies. The second source is more banal and even more frightening: the influence of movies and television. As one interviewee puts ...”

“... In The Dying Animal, Kenny Kepesh’s ‘good’ behaviour is a response to his fear of losing his self-image as a good person: ‘He lives in fear of a woman telling him he’s not [admirable].’ In Indignation, Marcus is never morally concerned with ‘wrongdoing’, only with getting caught. Good behaviour is just a code, determined by collective fear. The ...”

“... Vegetarians, we say,​ are self-righteous and humourless; or fussy and weird; or like Hitler; we say that their diet makes them anaemic; that having to cater for them ruins every dinner party; that they are crazy not to eat bacon/lamb shanks/pepperoni because we evolved as hunter-gatherers; that their food smells horrible, and by implication, so do they; that it’s cruel to bring up a child vegetarian; that they are hypocrites, because how can they pretend to care about animal suffering when they still buy clothes from normal shops – and are those leather shoes by any chance? Vegetarians themselves often argue that they make us feel uncomfortable because their existence is a reminder of the cruelty and carnage that the rest of us refuse to see; there’s probably some truth in this ...”

“... The golden era of Ukrainian national identity was not tsarist Russia – where Ukrainian national self-assertion was thwarted – but the first decade of the Soviet Union, when Soviet policy in a Ukraine exhausted by war and famine was ‘indigenisation’. Ukrainian culture and language were revived, and rights to healthcare, education and social security ...”

“... he watched the ruling family and their friends doing business and enjoying themselves. Ahmed was a self-confident man, not noticeably intimidated by the sporadic shooting which was keeping most people in Tripoli off the streets. I asked him if he would consider working for me as a guide and assistant and he agreed. Tripoli had run out of petrol but he quickly ...”

“... meet him in the lobby of one of the big hotels, or in his office above a coffee bar – a tall, self-deprecatingly dashing figure with high cheekbones and exquisite shirts. He is brilliant, charming and droll, and his presence works like air-conditioning on the perspiration and stench of Thai politics. Over the course of an hour with Korn, it resolves into ...”

“... values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality TV – abject self-exposure from which we just can’t look away? Or perhaps, Clune suggests, people liken My Struggle to a drug because reading it can feel like consuming vast quantities of essentially undifferentiated material: all crack is the same, you just want more and ...”

“... But Lawrence wasn’t all that interested in ur-versions of his poems: the more he threw off self-censorship, and the set forms and other tasteful packaging which came with it, the more he wanted the poems to feel like drafts. If free verse meant ‘there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished’ then his poems’ artistic quality would lie ...”

“... of the company were situated – which portrayed Fox as an Oriental despot. The blatantly self-serving enormities of the East India Bill brought about the defeat of the measure and the downfall of the coalition by the end of 1783. Behind the scenes George III put pressure on MPs to reject the bill, but the overthrow of the unnatural coalition was ...”

“... Holocaust, except that Urwand’s villains are Hitler’s willing Jewish dupes, or perhaps even self-hating quislings. Where Hollywood and Hitler discusses the ways that Nazi Germany was represented (or not) in American newsreels and independent films, as well as the fate of German movies in the US, The Collaboration is more narrowly ...”

“... with whom one may do as one wants – in every form of engagement, from tender care to sadistic self-pleasuring. A doll will not bite, will not let rip with her tongue. Rilke describes this ideal complicity in ‘On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel’, an impassioned and influential essay about dolls: ‘made into a confidant, an accomplice, like a dog, but ...”

“... the Tudor law courts, which he certainly exploited with enthusiasm in perennial litigation, as any self-respecting Elizabethan gentleman would. It is symbolic of a certain insularity in Byrd that he owned this peculiarly English legal text while his inept word-setting in his one Italian song reveals that he had no idea how that language was spoken. And he ...”