“... or Belgium, the process was smooth and friendly. Britain, so the story went, was freely granting self-government to its colonies as the culmination of imperial rule, which had always had this as its ultimate aim – ‘Empire into Commonwealth’, as the history books used to put it. If for no other reason, the myth was needed in order to make ordinary ...”

“... adept in modern forms of communication, and decked out in green. The Islamic Republic’s self-image, virtuous and united against relentless foreign conspiracies, was shattered under the force of mass demonstrations, street violence, the ill-treatment and murder of young men and women, squabbling factions, incivility, seminarians at loggerheads, and ...”

“... the Chinese hadn’t wanted to smoke the stuff, it would not have gone on. China’s wounds were self-inflicted. ‘Worms only appear in a rotten carcass,’ was how one man put it in the 1860s. This seems to have been the usual Chinese reaction to the Opium Wars for years afterwards. ‘If a people is dispirited and stupid,’ Yan Fu wrote half a century ...”

“... concept of his science of roughness. What are fractals? The short answer is mathematical models of self-similarity and self-resemblance: objects whose parts mimic the whole. Natural examples abound: a cauliflower is made up of florets, or miniature cauliflowers, each of which in turn is composed of smaller florets, and so ...”

“... communities established their own militias, to protect themselves and enforce their demands for self-rule. The communist insurgency is long over, but more than two dozen ‘ethnic armed organisations’ still exist (the largest fielding more than twenty thousand troops with armour and heavy artillery), plus hundreds of smaller groups. No one knows how many ...”

“... Mary Whitall Smith, lived for emotional drama and the struggle, as she would later put it, for ‘self-development, real education, knowledge, enjoyment’. From a wealthy family of Philadelphia Quakers, Mary shocked her parents by marrying Frank Costelloe, an Irish Catholic barrister with political ambitions. Their daughter Rachel (almost immediately known ...”

“... didn’t write after Mockingbird, this would seem to be the one that came closest to escaping her self-censoring vigilance. Much of the relevant biographical information is well known, but it takes on new meaning in the light of this project. It’s interesting to go back to the period in 1959 between delivery and publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, when ...”

“... when the grievances of the Egyptian people have been met by the Egyptian government’. With their self-contained military cities, where comfortable apartments and foreign goods can be had at a discount, and with their vast stake in an economy based on a mix of clientelism and neo-liberalism, senior army officers live in a world apart from most ...”

“... is bright with lipstick and amused. Her gestures are as large as fireworks. She puts her whole self into the process of speaking, moving her hands as if she’s flinging handfuls of certainty away from her body. Charcoal cashmere and a slender chain; her hair the correct camel of a good coat. In a scene where she reads her own writing, she looks happy, and ...”

“... and Just before the Divorce (a collection of poems) were published: both are woman-hating and self-parodying. In the title poem of Just before the Divorce, a man fantasises about raping and killing his wife, who has ‘middle-class desires’. He ‘hangs her perfect breasts from the attic rafter./A final shot –/dead, he grins at a twitching twat’. In ...”

“... the text of the burden of narrative, which to Flattery usually means tedious contrivance or self-serving sentimentality. The narrator of ‘Hump’ – a reference to the hunchback she suddenly develops – mocks the tendency to transform life and people into stories and characters as she does the catering at her father’s funeral, trying to avoid fake ...”

“... through ordinary political action. But what it has done has not interfered much with democratic self-governance.’ What most matters, he concludes, is who gets put on the bench, and I’ll return to this. Oddly for a book about the United Kingdom, what none of the essays in this book addresses is the pivotal relationship between the European Court of Human ...”

“... papers would report another classic white African murder: drunken father kills wife, children, self. Carolyn Slaughter and Alexandra Fuller’s memoirs of ‘an African childhood’ try, indirectly, to explain how generations of white people who ‘knew what was best for their Africans’ got it so wrong. Before the Knife and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs ...”

“... life in general, one which smacks of the patrician rather than the puritan. Adopting this witty, self-ironising style has been the quickest route for expatriates like Wilde, Wittgenstein, Ernest Gellner, Isaiah Berlin or Tom Stoppard to become English. In doing so, they compensate for their outsider status by becoming honorary aristocrats, superior to the ...”

“... friends, Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and the young Keats were all, like him, mostly self-educated and chronically short of money. Haydon had also come to know Wordsworth, who was in London in December 1817. On the 28th Haydon invited him to dinner to meet Keats. Charles Lamb was there. Hazlitt, who had attacked Wordsworth in print, was not ...”