“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sir Hugh Casson, who had directed the architecture of the Festival of Britain, was lively-minded, self-critical and immune to lying propaganda; his vivid journal of the trip is one of Wright’s best sources. A.J. Ayer, preacher of logical positivism, was small, sensual and irrepressibly witty. John Chinnery, a ‘China expert’, was very young and still in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of how hated Germany has become in parts of Southern Europe feel merely pained, misunderstood. The self-image of Germany as a bewildered, kindly nation, helpless to defend itself against greedy neighbours, dies hard. It was lent credibility a few weeks ago by an eccentric European Central Bank report which asserted that – in terms of ‘per household ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with their arrogance and their aggressiveness, their contempt for the rest of us, their supreme self-satisfaction and self-confidence. The last of this species – Zola’s Octave (inventor of the first department store) and Maupassant’s ‘bel ami’ – still marry into money, but finally trace a route for their ...”

“... something of an orthodoxy in these circles that our behaviour is rarely governed by rational self-interest, but is swayed by norms, habits, instincts and emotions. Yet when such irrational forces, combined with techniques of psychological experimentation and influence of the sort used by nudgers on social media platforms, disrupted the democratic arena ...”

“... Statistics. Jobs are characterised according to their employment relations. Employers, the self-employed and employees are differentiated, with the last (and much the largest) group subdivided according to contractual status. Zero-hours contracts are an extreme case of the commodification of labour already implicit in working for a wage; salaried ...”

“... to the breakdown of the marriage she’d been in since 1997, with the tall and saturnine Will Self? ‘I started being treated in October for a mental illness I hadn’t even heard of: complex post-traumatic stress disorder … It comes about when you suppress traumas and carry on regardless … You thrum with stress.’A couple of weeks after that was ...”

“... border: in Tell Me How It Ends, the confident posture of nonfiction; in Lost Children Archive, the self-conscious narrator who mistrusts the possibility of representation. In both books, not only can Luiselli not tell us how it ends, but she resists telling us what to think. And yet her fictional narrator does have a goal for her own storytelling: ‘Helping ...”

“... reckon with. In an elegantly succinct chapter on the films, Arsenjuk anatomises their dialectical self-division between an ‘epic-heroic’ and a ‘theatrical-grotesque’ mode: on one hand, the epochal pathos and ecstasy of the dictatorship of the proletariat; on the other, a wily guerrilla tactic of explosion, caricature and Grand Guignol. Further ...”

“... deplored the Soviet regime and wanted all its dirty secrets exposed, his approach had none of the self-involvement of (say) Alain Besançon, the humourless righteousness of Richard Pipes or Leonard Schapiro’s cold disdain. There was a jokey, blokey aspect to Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an ...”