“... a single night’s co-ordinated attacks, IS – a cultish militia perhaps 35,000 strong, ruling a self-declared ‘caliphate’ that no one recognises as a state – achieved something France denied the Algerian FLN until 1999, nearly four decades after independence: acknowledgment that it had been fighting a war, rather than a campaign against ...”

“... more harm than good. Take the notion of a personality that persists through time – an enduring self or soul or spirit that can be loved or hated for its past actions and future projects. It is a ‘fiction’, according to Hume, based on unwarranted associations of ideas; but it is also indispensable to morality, and we might be wise to treat it as if it ...”

“... Between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th, he argues, ‘social thinkers had encircled the self with wider and wider rings of relations, structures, contexts and institutions. Human beings were born into social norms, it was said. Their life chances were sorted out according to their place in the social structure; their very personalities took shape ...”

“... a further salience because the journeys undertaken involve a complex negotiation between the self-consciously contemporary and the self-consciously archaic. The condition of that salience is rhetorical rather than narrative. On each occasion, a Bowling-esque rant against the modern world’s artificiality provides a ...”

“... basis of whom they feared more, the army or the Brothers. In Cairo, the old, narrow politics of self-interest – or self-defence – seemed to be crowding out Tahrir Square’s expansive visions of a democratic future. I wondered whether Alexandria, a port city with a rich history of political independence, would be any ...”

“... the Grantham years of strict Methodism and endless homework, before she lost her essential self in becoming a manufactured, voiced-coached projection. Like the robot warrior Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. A mantle of silence had fallen over land and river. The elderly couple now perched on hard benches, with bowed heads, resting, enjoying their ...”

“... is a recursive process, original virtue, once thrown out of equilibrium by an external cause, may self-destruct. Political virtue requires upkeep. So Honig faces a challenge similar to Runciman’s: in democracy, virtù needs to be dispersed among the populace, not merely modelled by tribunes. Honig aims to counter the vogue current in some quarters for Carl ...”

“... long after they had become desperate, disorganised and depleted rabbles. On occasion the mask of self-belief would slip, and he would confess that all was lost; at the end, he announced to his intimates, he would put a bullet through his brain. ‘We’ll not capitulate. Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.’ The German people, Hitler ...”

“... called Charlotte. True, however, by the accounts of all historians is the shattering blow to his self-esteem delivered when the Vienna Academy turned down his application to study art. ‘Too few heads. Sample drawing unsatisfactory.’ He had been fanatically certain that he would get in, and the wound of that rejection, perhaps his only solid ...”

“... were other ways of checking. Some discreet inquiries revealed that the Mugabe supporter and ‘self-styled emissary of Beelzebub’, as one British judge described him, Nicholas van Hoogstraten, had left the country on election night. One had to assume he knew something. I drove along Churchill Avenue, past Normandy and Arundel Roads and Dunkirk Drive ...”

“... it would probably have marked the beginning of the end of his premiership, well before the self-inflicted wounds of the autumn. July now seems a long time ago, and Cameron will be hoping that his Rwandan tribulations are behind him. But the lesson that any rational politician would take from his experiences is that nothing about the interconnection ...”

“... because there is no one else stupid enough to do it’. ‘Stupid’ is Lurie’s ironic bit of self-congratulation. But Coetzee wants us to see that the stupidity may be more real than the honour because the corpses really don’t care.But then the idea of honour doesn’t die just because the dogs do. What the writer doesn’t understand in Diary of a Bad ...”

“... Janice is as happy as a sandgirl, wrapped up warm inside the cosy paradise of pre-school domestic self-sufficiency. There’s a wireless to sing along to; there are butter-and-sugar sandwiches; at night, once the settee is folded out, Beth is ‘hemmed in’, stuck comfortingly in what the anxious little girl thinks of as ‘this wonderful little rat-cage of ...”

“... The date and reasons for this punishment are disputed, but it’s plausible that his glowing self-presentation in the Anabasis was constructed with one eye on his fellow townsmen. Was he hoping to be recalled? The stated aim of friendship with Cyrus bears on the nature of his narrative in another way. With the end of the Peloponnesian War, indigent ...”

“... her mother). Mitford and Romilly spent much of their time dreaming up hopelessly unrealistic and self-aggrandising schemes. One bright idea, which predictably came to nothing, was to rope in other members of the Out of Bounds group and offer themselves as an English consortium on the lecture circuit. Philip Toynbee, as Mitford explains elsewhere, was down to ...”