“... a deceitful individual who blurs the distinction between the political and the economic out of self-interest. It stigmatises in foreigners precisely those features considered desirable in citizens: the desire to work, the will to self-improvement, and the willingness to invest one’s own human capital where it will ...”

“... supplies to frontline troops. Chekh describes them variously as noble and infuriating, kind and self-serving, materially generous but emotionally needy. They have passive-aggressive snits if you deny them a selfie or ‘don’t post a photo of a box of baked goods on Facebook’. Everything decent in Chekh’s bunker, apart from the chainsaw to cut wood for ...”

“... But the poetry took shape as a drama of desire, nagged by a suspicion that one can’t be a self by oneself. For every Auden poem that dares to hope the soul may ‘be weaned at last to independent delight’, there is a voice in the wings whispering something not unlike what Auden said of Oscar Wilde – ‘Alone, he does not know who he is.’ The ...”

“... no personal information, not even a gender. This is, if not professional suicide, then a form of self-harm. On rare occasions invisibility can become part of an author’s mystique, whether that invisibility is absolute (B. Traven), relative (Thomas Pynchon) or precarious (Elena Ferrante), but there has to be a readership in place first. These days ...”

“... King Jr was murdered on a hotel balcony in the west of the city. Five foot two, green-eyed, a self-described ‘gypsy-spirited tyrannical pirate’ with a face that was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in ...”

“... about the nature of the original aspiration. Hubris and duplicity are twisted in with clarity and self-sacrifice. We’re reminded that Stalin and Mao were the Algerian insurgents’ contemporaries. Lenin was a sacred text. Among his comrades, Fanon had admired above all Abane Ramdane, the architect of the insurgency’s first provisional government and ...”

“... him affecting still: that frail physique, the greasy tail-coat and the style, histrionic but not self-choreographed; and, the concert over, going home in his old raincoat through the fogs of Fifties Manchester. 4 June. In one of the new monologues, Playing Sandwiches, I give the five or six-year-old Samantha studs in her ears, while at the same time thinking ...”

“... idols – everything short of cow dung itself – the young travellers all became rude, often self-indulgently scornful. They pushed beggars out of the way, like ancient feudal squires. All of them young and liberal, some politically radical, all compassionate under comfortable domestic circumstances, yet somehow the fierce heat and the sheer population ...”

“... of Austria. ‘The Jester Named Don Juan of Austria’ (1633) What did it mean for Habsburg self-consciousness, the question follows, that it made room at court for a lugubrious parody of one of its greatest heroes? And in what spirit was Velázquez enlisted to immortalise the parody? War and buffoonery went together easily in Madrid. The Dutch ...”

“... teens, ‘to see the world’, and left in their early thirties and early forties as remarkably self-sufficient men who, despite this self-sufficiency, often found life on land savourless and disappointing. When moved to summarise what his years (1934-46) in the Royal Navy had done for him, Raymond Dutton (Mechanician ...”

“... vehicles, not only those of the police and fire services, but military trucks of the Japan Self-Defence Forces. As the road descended towards the coast, their jaunty mood began to evaporate. Suddenly, before they understood where they were, they had entered the tsunami zone. There was no advance warning, no marginal area of incremental damage. The wave ...”

“... past puberty and so less submissive, more anarchic and all over the place, though there is one self-contained boy, who is neat, smart and prematurely sophisticated, a boy out of Saki. Finally the sixth form: half a dozen boys and one girl. Except not boys: one has a full-grown beard and though destined for Cambridge looks less like an undergraduate than a ...”

“... lost in the most heartbreaking manner – by coming within an inch of the finish line and then self-destructing’. He cites as evidence one of the most famous of all baseball images, the moment at the end of game six of the 1975 World Series, when ‘Carlton Fisk managed to overcome the laws of physics by body English’ – he swung his arms at the ball ...”

“... core strength lies, as it has always done, among the small manufacturers, shopkeepers and self-employed in what were once fortresses of the DC: the Catholic provinces of the North-East, now increasingly secularised, where hatred of taxes and of interference by the central state runs especially strong. Here resentment of fiscal transfers to the ...”

“... opportunity of designing buildings for an entirely new form of society. Peter Ahrends’s self-published book A3: Threads and Connections is an oblique telling of this tale, through three generations of architects. Peter founded the influential firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK) in 1960s London, and his grandfather, Bruno, was one of the principal ...”