“... to the offices of the firm of solicitors where she worked. My mother was her stylish, professional self. A short while after that, when she was 60, she had a severe, paralysing stroke. But at that last telling, I understood. I had by then stood in the doorway of a baby’s room, leaned over a cot, and listened for the small, blessed exchange of air in his new ...”

“... based on the fact that I was prepared to listen to such people.’ Not a very sensible thing for a self-styled elder statesman to say. Paul Scheffer, a left-wing columnist with political ambitions who became famous by taking a very public stance against multiculturalism, grew quite excited when Michael Ignatieff’s name came up in his conversation with ...”

“... a collector or connoisseur. In the middle of this peculiar book Clark drifts from the diarist’s self-communion to an after-dinner speech to old comrades and delivers his ‘inevitable 1960s anecdote’. Standing on the steps of the National Gallery, at the ‘edge of a demonstration’, he discusses ‘the (sad) necessity of iconoclasm in a revolutionary ...”

“... conundrum of his popularity, but biography – with its focus on the conscious and acting self – just isn’t the best optic through which to examine that question. Of course, Taylor ‘made’ his media career, and Wrigley’s tales of his canny pursuit of publishers and Burk’s columns of figures show how he did it, but a certain media culture ...”

“... as saving, for example. In the tradition of Adam Smith, this proposal relies more on national self-interest than on virtue, and would need relatively little international co-operation to function. But more often Stiglitz’s reforms ask for permanent international bureaucracies to be set up: a judicial body to determine whether trade barriers are ...”

“... me that most of the people I’ve talked to from this kind of lunatic background incline towards self-pity and self-abuse. There’s a loneliness involved in survival, in the kind of class-changing that involves disowning, and in some way despising one’s own family and saying, at least for a while: I hate you, I’ll ...”

“... to able to be speak for a whole tribe. The basic social unit was the tiyospaye, an economically self-sufficient village or lodge group of interrelated families that acted together during the year. Although this sort of complexity makes it difficult to associate any modern tribal identity with prehistoric sites, Gibbon carefully and convincingly links the ...”

“... Court decisions challenging the legality of the Musharraf regime had restored the country’s self-respect. But the judges were not popular in the United States or Euroland, where elite opinion was obsessed with occupation and war. For defending the civil rights of the poor, the chief justice was referred to in the Guardian as a ‘judicial ...”

“... gravity from the sense of “privilege” to that of “security”’, leaving the ‘immunitary self-preservation of life’ as the central issue for subsequent political theory and praxis. For Esposito, this is the origin of modern biopolitics, in which individuals are for the first time truly singular, ‘surrounded by a boundary that simultaneously ...”

“... fondness for the countryside. Léger was perceptive enough to see the pretensions, but also the self-control, of the man on the bicycle ‘scrupulously obeying the laws of perspective’, as he put it. Le Corbusier was as careful about his appearance as he was about his pronouncements: both were a means to an end. The trademark circular spectacles (he was ...”

“... be appointed a squad leader can push you around any way he wants,’ he warns. The army depends on self-deception: A sentence comes to me, that I read once, written by some general: ‘The soldier must die with dignity.’ It must have seemed pretty simple to the general at his desk. A bullet hits you in the chest, you raise your arms, shout, ‘It is good to ...”

“... brutally suppress any sign of resistance, then scuttle before you’ve properly prepared it for self-government – and expect everything to turn out OK. That’s with the best will in the world; of which there was some, but not enough, in the British Empire. It probably hasn’t ever happened in history. It certainly didn’t happen in Zimbabwe, where ...”

“... Places. But few people reckoned with Ransome’s remarkable energy and ingenuity where his own self-preservation was concerned. He could charm his way out of any tight corner. He also reminds me at times of P.G. Wodehouse’s antihero, Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, with his pince-nez made of ginger-beer wire, his untidy clothes and his utter lack of ...”

“... with his audience. His moral lessons seem designed to catch out the inattentive or the self-contented just when they think they have worked out how things stand. The fables seem homely, and their morals easy to find (don’t forget to be nice to mice, even if you’re a lion); but repeatedly the moralitas snaps into a different register in order to ...”

“... of Bosworth, Garrick and his wife Eva-Maria Veigel, the painting known as The Shrimp Girl, the self-portrait of Hogarth with his unfortunately named pug Trump – but to see all the portraits together is a revelation, and should establish Hogarth, in spite of his contempt for ‘phiz-mongers’, as a portraitist of equal brilliance to ...”