“... which folly, that child of absolute power, rules events; in other words, a world in which a fatal self-delusion that is both comic and tragic is always with us. Cavafy’s ‘canon’ comprises 154 poems. These two new books – Sachperoglou’s Collected Poems and Haviaras’s The Canon – translate each and every poem. Some thirty unfinished ...”

“... master at the Collège du Havre, ‘left no opinion of his disruptive pupil’. Monet was a self-described ‘vagabond’ child who for forty years never spoke of his mother. The written records are largely one-sided: he threw away other people’s letters while they kept his. Camille exists only in people’s comments about her: there is a single ...”

“... CDC Group. These public funds allowed Naqvi to shift gear, becoming an ‘impact investor’ – a self-appointed capitalist saviour of the wretched of the earth – and being invited to sit on the boards of various councils and commissions for CEOs interested in sustainable development.In 2012, Naqvi paid half a million dollars in sponsorship to a Clinton ...”

“... admittedly long list of legatees’. It’s hard not to read this throwaway remark as a glancing, self-deprecating self-portrait: in the universe that Herron has created in his Slough House series, the headquarters of one of Britain’s intelligence agencies is ‘the Park’ rather than ‘the Fairground’ or, as in le ...”

“... of a single, all-representative ‘Negro’. His mother, Carrie, was by all accounts feckless and self-absorbed, and often left him in the care of his grandmother or family friends, while his father departed for Mexico soon after Langston was born. Just before writing ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, Hughes had been pondering his father’s ‘strange ...”

“... a prominent Baptist minister who grew up in poverty in rural Georgia and through hard work and self-discipline managed to join Atlanta’s Black middle class. The elder King established strong connections with the city’s white power brokers – so strong, in fact, that even while speaking out against racism he urged parishioners, including the ...”

“... became part of the New Negro movement and transformed the nationalist politics of Black self-defence, learned in his childhood, into communism in the early 1930s. Their relationship began at roughly the time the Popular Front was founded, and the movement offered them a way to universalise their early political commitment. They took part in ...”

“... an ironmonger to cast it and an artilleryman to load, point and fire it.’Since laws are not self-executing, one concern is that the ideal of the rule of law becomes the rule of those empowered to enforce the law. This worry – usually attributed to Thomas Hobbes, but it too can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle – is often expressed in ...”

“... trying out different approaches at different moments: memoir, mystery, gleeful doomscroll, self-conscious epic of the American berserk (‘Of arms and the murderer I sing’). The shifts in tone that accompany these experiments are the book’s least successful feature. Sarcastic asides (‘How about a little arsenic, Scarecrow?’), solemn injunctions ...”

“... that wagged its tail, snorted or purred. Averse to multiculturalism in France, Bardot became the self-appointed emissary of a mixed-species nation, from domesticated rabbits to baby seals, doing her best to speak out on their behalf. She took their rights as seriously as she took her mission. Mosquitoes, clams and Mediterranean oysters were not on her list ...”

“... brother. The case was muddied by the fact that there were no powder burns on the body, which a self-inflicted wound would have left. The coroner chose to ignore this anomaly and a verdict of suicide was returned. One of Smith’s sisters, however, was convinced there had been foul play, and Berryman too had Hamlet-like doubts about the possibility that his ...”

“... Irish resistance to British rule had become too ingrained, and some experimental concession of self-government was the only way forward. But the same logic applied to Ulster Protestants within a self-governing Ireland and in 1886, stimulated by family pressure from Belfast, Bryce urged Gladstone to consider separate ...”

“... free himself from his alcoholism, drug addiction and chronic depression was not psychoanalysis but self-analysis. Almost every day from 1979 to 1999 he talked into a tape recorder, which is the equivalent of arraigning yourself in your own court and getting off on good behaviour. ‘You can’t lie to yourself,’ he said, with a straight face.By then, pickled ...”

“... inequity leaves open the possibility of chaos, and creates endless opportunities for individual self-aggrandisement. But it seems to me that the risks were worth taking, now that we’ve seen the dismal results of our 20-year-long experiments with centralised targets, management echelons and paper-based accountability. A couple of years ago I spent several ...”

“... a black-and-white film of an execution, followed by a repeated shot of an engraving, a Rembrandt self-portrait, black eyes staring, face frozen. This man really does seem to have seen what we have just seen. I’m naming names because that seems to be the quickest way of conveying something of the effect of what’s on the screen, but gesture is also ...”