“... 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 ...”

“... that this reveals – in the face of misadventures that would have sunk most such zealous self-promoters – would alone merit a careful investigation of how Alcibiades worked his magic. The number of those seemingly taken in by him, beginning with Thucydides and including various modern scholars and writers, makes an impressive list. The best place ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wars shows that although these weapons may not provide a decisive edge in combat they excel in self-advertisement, projecting an image of all-seeing omnipotence. Drones induce terror in civilian populations and healthy profits for manufacturers. The spell persists even when they are unarmed. Protesters in Minneapolis on the morning of 29 May, three days ...”

“... and he was 34. The local church recorded their deaths as ‘Mord und Selbstmord’ – murder and self-murder.Their graves, by the edge of the lake, are now a tourist attraction, enhanced by an immersive audio experience inviting visitors to contemplate the many unknowns that surround their last days. Depending on your degree of cynicism, their relationship ...”

“... dozens of insurrections have been launched, for the most part by ethnic minority groups seeking self-determination and later autonomy within a federal system. Until now, these conflicts have largely been confined to the seven ‘ethnic states’ on the country’s western, northern and eastern/southeastern borders. Now, PDFs are striking at the Bamar ...”

“... test to see which would win out when her personal convictions came into conflict with Scotland’s self-determination, that was it.Forbes’s conservative supporters seem to think that she should be given a Get Out of Jail Free card: it’s not her fault, it’s her faith and that of her community. Underlying this is a theological ‘blackboxing’, as if ...”

“... are two Kincaids: Elaine Potter Richardson, the daughter of the domineering Annie Drew, and the self-fashioning writer, Jamaica Kincaid. In Kincaid’s fictional world, to be someone’s daughter is to carry a great burden. To become yourself, you must reject, kill, refuse the mother, leave home, write books and essays against her, marry a white man, build ...”

“... a state-imposed exile from the centres of imperial power in St Petersburg and Moscow and then to a self-imposed flight to the West. Herzen initially found inspiration in the French Revolution, but the suffocating bourgeois capitalism that had triumphed across Europe and culminated in the failed revolution of 1848 led him to seek alternatives elsewhere. Before ...”

“... but he saw them. Which also shows how enticing it was to sit for him. Because even though I felt self-conscious about my appearance, the very act of sitting was irresistible.’She liked the evening sessions best. They would begin with a longish stretch – fifty minutes or so – then break for tea in the kitchen and do a shorter stint before dinner. He ...”

“... influences’, while at the same time rebutting claims of racial inferiority and agitating for self-government in West Africa. Respect and disdain for British society fostered a belief in national self-government, which would play out in the politics of the next generation of students. The rise of racism and national ...”

“... subjects. She has warned readers not to mistake the ‘I’ in her poems for straightforward self-expression. ‘When I use the autobiographical, it is as artifice. It is not an invitation to witness transparency,’ she says in Salvage. ‘Where it appears, it will have been pored over, turned over, analysed, refashioned as art and made theoretical ...”

“... Alboufaki is the mount of Carathis, Vathek’s malignant enchantress mother, and a kind of self-portrait of Beckford himself, Landry suggests, with his ‘desire for solitude, and his nose for the pestilential and the ghastly’. Beckford, she says, gives us a ‘monstrous camel as also a type of the self . . . as ...”