“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and endnote referencing is light.In asking whether we can ‘find ways to pursue luxurious self-expression without the suffering of others’, Working’s new book also carries a political message. In the Tudor and Stuart era, Working wonders, ‘did women connect the brutal extraction of silver or other luxury goods with the jewellery pinned to their ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... years on the throne, the queen had, according to Batten, committed treason against herself – a self-inflicted lèse-majesté. In another age, the Tower of London would be dusting down Thomas More’s old cell for him. But it would be unfair to dismiss Batten as a know-nothing stirrer, though often his behaviour does seem to fit that description: calling ...”

“... Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had led IS since 2010, in a US raid in north-west Syria was celebrated in a self-glorifying speech by Donald Trump as proof that IS had been definitively destroyed. The claim had some substance: al-Baghdadi, who five years earlier had declared himself caliph in the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, was the most important surviving symbol of IS as ...”

“... Fonda, say. Fonda acted once in Omaha with Marlon’s mother. Could Brando have been so calm, self-effacing and available to us as Fonda is in 12 Angry Men? Could he have played the chump in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve without angling for sympathy? There has always been a strain of American acting that is resolute, simple and content to trust a known ...”

“... Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the morning. They’re wrong. I nearly died in an experimental-plane accident with John Denver. People ...”