“... among other things, to be somewhere else’) and goes on to describe Montaigne as putting ‘not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence’. Astonishment, fluidity and changefulness are inherently resistant to precepts which describe how they come about, and these things are Montaigne’s ...”

“... a story and doing good, she would try to do good. It was a strange, provoking, deliberately self-contradictory tale, which instantly sparked heated commentary. It was hard to figure out Coetzee’s meaning. Yet the fictive device had justified itself: one felt that the other participants had been content with their perfected errors while Coetzee, in his ...”

“... Sir Denis Wright, Mayers’s successor in Mersin, O’Neill learns that contrary to his family’s self-presentation as pillars of Turkish society, the Syrians were in fact ‘disliked, mistrusted and envied by the Turks because of their origin, their religion and their wealth . . . the flashiness of their behaviour and their group instinct’. The ...”

“... the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which since 1984 has been fighting for self-rule for the 15 million Turkish Kurds. Like Isis, the PKK combines fanatical ideological commitment with military expertise and experience gained in long years of guerrilla war. Marxist-Leninist in its original ideology, the PKK is run from the top and seeks ...”

“... as such. Even before the Harry Potter books were published with two sets of covers to fit the self-images of two overlapping readerships, Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer, marketed domestically as a children’s book, could be published in Italian translation as for adults. The Young Adult label has a faintly disparaging though illogical overtone (would ...”

“... into turmoil, as ‘bourgeois experts’ came under suspicion of treason and young outsiders, self-styled ‘proletarians’ with Party cards, assailed establishments in every field. The social sciences were no exception: the ‘modern’ professions of sociology, psychology, criminology, demography and statistics suffered tremendous setbacks: they lost ...”

“... the local press. Nothing was more likely to produce a manic reaction than the release of a genuine self-confessed Soviet spy from jail. As in cities under wartime bombardment, the combination of real danger and declared enemy ferocity entrenched the determination of the besieged garrison of Communist and philo-Communists. In Britain it certainly prevented any ...”

“... to take real steps towards disarmament. Otherwise, non-nuclear states will regard their demands as self-serving and hypocritical – reason enough to think about creating an arsenal of their own. It isn’t hard to guess how the Russians, the Chinese and other nuclear powers reacted to the US’s announcement. The Obama administration, which in public supports ...”

“... responded when she saw the plans. Over eight pages she dismissed the scheme as an alienating, self-consciously futuristic ‘Flash Gordon job’. She begged her father to build something instead that ‘expresses the best of the society in which you live, and at the same time your hopes for the betterment of this society’.Bronfman, keen to have his ...”

“... coercion and mobilisation, but buttressed by patriotism and aspirations to a socialist version of self-betterment. While most historians see both terror and civilisation as important to understanding the Soviet experience of the 1930s, they tend to spend their time investigating either one or the other. Schlögel is the first to attempt to knit them together ...”

“... made, whose preferences we say don’t track their ‘real interests’. Where we should think ‘self-determination’, we still think ‘save’. Grant wants​ to go back to an older politics. The problem with humanitarianism isn’t just that it provides a vehicle for displaced imperial ventures, or that it can go badly wrong. It’s that it misses the ...”

“... the nods to Kafka, Faulkner and Beckett don’t look stiff. In the caustic accounts of hikers’ self-indulgent inwardness, and of the way backpackers float their idylls on a sea of poverty, he gets at themes dramatised in his earlier novels with, this time, no stagey debates. Arctic Summer​ is, in many ways, a rewrite of In a Strange Room: the story of a ...”

“... and knew me,’ but there doesn’t seem to be much irony here, only considerable impatience and self-aggrandisement, such as comes from knowing you’re the hero of a novel. We also, by this stage of the work, have read quite a few pages of the notebook as it was being written (‘to me art has never seemed a subject or an aspect of form, but rather a ...”

“... much on transmitting skills and not enough on teaching facts. The running here has been made by a self-appointed pressure group calling itself Better History, formed in 2006 to advise the Conservative shadow education team. The group, which is led by Seán Lang, a former schoolteacher, seems to have supplied Gove with many of his ideas – chief among them ...”

“... the contracts from international donors; and $120 billion of overseas Libyan assets. The new self-appointed transitional government, with its expatriate professors, mid-level businessmen and aged dissidents, would struggle. Gaddafi himself predicted much of this. And it was easy in my first few hours in Libya to find evidence for this way of ...”