“... 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 ...”

“... from which important poetry proceeds.’ It was the work of Edward Thomas, like Spencer a profound self-doubter, that suggested how he might move away from the urgent, gnomic compressions of Wystan the Wunderkind. ‘In what sense am I joining in?’ he asks in the opening poem of Aegean Islands, ‘Allotments: April’; it is Spencer’s sense of being at an ...”

“... themselves that Hitler’s Germany was a place where the Prussian virtues of fairness and self-restraint could still flourish, and who discovered their mistake too late. About the exiles for whom the East Prussia they lost but still see in dreams continues to exist on a plane beyond reality. But it is also about what did happen in this ...”

“... and the rest’, but a means by which Iran could itself become Western and restore national self-respect. Britain, he noted, had ‘assumed world leadership in nuclear power production’ while ‘America’s long-range nuclear submarines roam the seven seas.’ Iran would once again be great like them. In March 1974, Iran and France struck a deal for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Chesterton hated. This genial tribute from the champion of Orthodoxy with a capital O to the self-styled ‘Iconoclast’ (Bradlaugh’s pen name) was not simply another piece of glittering paradox, one more instance of Chesterton’s determination to startle the reader at all costs. On the contrary, that was the way most people saw Bradlaugh. From the ...”

“... is a heavy load, or ‘noyous for to carye’, as the garrulous English eagle complains. That self-effacing joke is typical of Chaucer, and it isn’t the only time he remarks on his chubbiness, but it may also express a kind of phonic national modesty. Italian is an easier language in which to fly than English. It has a higher frequency of liquid ...”

“... and Ireland in 1800, the north-eastern counties, with their Protestant majority, became the most self-consciously British region of the United Kingdom. By the same token, Britishness of the Ulster kind – Orange parades and kerbsides painted red, white and blue – seems demonstrative and stridently un-British. To the summer visitor from Britain who pulls ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... parliament, of which he had a very low opinion – but in a life so devoted to grandiloquent self-promotion there was little room for irony. He was 34 years old, and the world was at this point rather less interested in him than he imagined. Admiration of Il Vate (The Bard), as he would come to be called, was and remains an essentially Italian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of that period, chances are that it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I cringed for my former self when I saw Philip Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation again. Everything about it was wrong, from the opening shots of crumbling plaster and dim lightbulbs in the stairwell of a Prague tenement (three of Kundera’s bugbears in The Art of the Novel are ...”