“... gets drunk or can’t get to sleep until dawn, it’s doubly satisfying. Wallander is scrupulously self-questioning, often worrying that in some small way he shares the dark urges behind the crimes he solves. Most of all, he worries about Swedish society, brooding on crime rates and responses to immigration – his own included – while trying to see his work ...”

“... the few things they had in common were obstinacy, irresponsibility and an almost total lack of self-control. From the moment they met until what Walter Scott called the ‘brutal insanity’ of the queen’s trial for adultery in 1820, the relationship was a catastrophe acted out in public with little regard for decency, let alone dignity. Ever since, this ...”

“... at first sight. The autopsy revealed 23 wounds on Visconti’s body. Was this really a case of self-defence? Was Sanpelayo perhaps ridding himself of an irksome rival by employing the services of a tough war veteran? Kesslitz, after all, needed the money, and his financial affairs were entirely in the hands of the Spaniard. Moreover, Kesslitz, it turned ...”

“... their historical significance, or even seeing them as historically inevitable, takes over from the self-righteous rhetoric of commending or condemning them. Or, indeed, of assessing their truth, a word which Jameson has now ominously begun to put in scare quotes. The case is embarrassingly close to the old liberal nostrum that to understand all is to forgive ...”

“... bellyful’ – but knew his case was far from unique: Wedgwood, Boulton and Watt were all largely self-taught. So, unconcerned by the views of those who looked down both on the provincial and on the novel as a form capable of effecting or even imagining real social change, Bage continually engaged in his fiction in a critique of the world in which he ...”

“... are being addressed in a new edition. The book begins with a prologue describing the magnificently self-congratulatory dinner held to celebrate completion of the original OED in Goldsmiths’ Hall on 6 June 1928. This was Derby Day, which allows Winchester to describe the social scene and to opine: ‘A great horse race on a sunny afternoon tends always to ...”

“... to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality. All we can safely predict is that, if exposed long enough to the tom-toms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with the savages.’ In The Manchurian Candidate it takes the diabolical Yen Lo ...”

“... artifice that can be entered only after things have broken down. They are, in short, as self-propelling and potentially dangerous as the sexual fantasies of The Fermata. The Fermata lost Baker a number of fans (‘Goodbye Nicholson Baker, goodbye for ever,’ Victoria Glendinning said). He has been scrambling ever since to recover his accreditation ...”

“... ocean of morphological possibility are natural selection, historical contingency and the laws of self-assembly and self-organisation. Butterflies with wingspans the size of tennis courts or mammals that lack respiratory systems are destined for the Zoo of Unrealisable Creatures. Evolution observes constraints. Some of ...”

“... description follows seductively from there: ‘She was wearing blue, or so I imagine it. Her blue self settled in the grey folds of his brain, and it stayed there for the rest of his life.’ On the surface, they are two servants meeting in the lobby of a hotel; but in the language, in the imagining of the scene, they are wonderful. It’s mythology. The ...”

“... contradicts its own Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: ‘All peoples shall have the right of self-determination.’Both the United States and the Soviet Union supported Nigeria’s federal government, but elsewhere around the world people sympathised with the underdog in one of the first armed conflicts to be widely televised. Don McCullin’s photograph ...”

“... prophesied by angels; he spent fifteen months in his mother’s womb and in that time became a self-taught Christian. In 1987, when he was 32, he claimed to have received what he called a ‘divine anointing’. He described entering a three-day trance during which God instructed him to establish his church. He also hung out with the Apostles, Elijah and ...”

“... He argued that China came to define itself as a modern nation-state partly as a means of self-affirmation, in reaction to Western incursions before the revolution. But it also seeks to recover a national identity that stretches as far back as the Tang or even Han dynasties. China may be more unitary than India, but the question of whether it takes a ...”

“... 10 per cent of surviving literature in ancient Greek, much of it memoir, pop philosophy or self-help.This means we can’t be sure how dangerous the Antonine sickness really was, how many lives it claimed or whether it affected rural areas as well as cities. We don’t even know when it ended. Galen mentions further waves after the initial crisis, and ...”

“... democratic leaders, almost without exception, have degrees from elite institutions – including self-styled populist ‘outsiders’ such as Donald Trump (University of Pennsylvania), J.D. Vance (Yale), Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford) and Marine Le Pen (Paris 2).The global populist​ wave has exposed the failure of meritocracy, whether democratic or ...”