“... Abdullah, had already been imprisoned by the Indian authorities and Lal Bahadur Shastri, Nehru’s self-effacing successor, took the decisive course of widening the war. The adventure was a fiasco. A conventional army was thrown into unfamiliar territory with none of the logistical, ideological or political moorings essential to a successful guerrilla ...”

“... an infectious vulgarity, and with it comes the power to make his enemies act with nearly as little self-restraint as he does. The proof is in the tweets. Meanwhile his administration is well along – and not very closely watched – on its slow march through the institutions. One example can stand for many. The US Environmental Protection Agency, created in ...”

“... Eliot thought it ‘the only ugliness’ in East Coker. It’s easy to smirk at Eliot – that self-proclaimed ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’, descended from over two hundred years of Americans and himself a US citizen until his 39th year – being mistaken for the cousin of an English country ...”

“... too political and that they will be targeted. One lawyer for the defence calls this ‘a form of self-censorship’.One faultline is the role of Islam – and of religion in general – in the trial. For many years, French scholars have debated the extent to which Islamic terrorism derives from Islam itself: the belief in a strong link between the two is ...”

“... need, to purchase goods as a token sacrifice against the hazards of travel. Leaving an older self behind, rooted, watching as you walk away, involves an element of risk. Stations are non-denominational places of worship, staffed by preoccupied disbelievers. The laws of time and space are different here. The narrator of The War of the Worlds strolls down ...”

“... created a more fictional character than the researching “I” in my doctorate,’ he wrote, ‘a self that begins in pretended ignorance and then slowly arrives at knowledge, not at all in the fitful, chancy way I myself arrived at it, but step by step, proof by proof, according to the rules.’ The trilogy opens with Bänkpress (1988), so far untranslated ...”

“... that L’Homme révolté had written off as grandiose and murderous. If Alleg had been the kind of self-reflexive, transcendent ‘rebel’ Camus favoured, he would almost certainly have been spared the torture chamber, but his involvement with the Algerian Communist Party meant that he was committed to independence alongside the FLN (which later forced the ...”

“... of how much progress has been made in machine learning, the process by which computer algorithms self-improve at tasks involving analysis and prediction. The techniques involved are primarily statistical: through trial and error the machine learns which answer has the highest probability of being correct. That sounds rough and ready, but because, as per ...”

“... afraid above all of being involved,’ Berlin once told a friend. Impatient with this legend of self-effacement, Pasternak’s sister Lydia (who lived in Oxford) moaned: ‘His present power over literature, in fact over everything in every field, is at times almost disastrous, I do not know how he contrives to hold everybody in such constant awe and fear ...”

“... Tony Blair emerges from these memoirs as a man of extraordinary intellectual self-confidence. He likes to think for himself, and decide for himself, whatever the issue. He takes this to be one of the key attributes of leadership, and it is why he believes he was cut out for it while other people (you can guess who) were not ...”

“... The American pair, the performers from La Gran Scena Opera, were very different in their self-presentation, and different from each other. They were appearing under their own names, Ira Siff and Keith Jurosko, rather than their stage personas (Vera Galupe-Borszkh, Gabriella Tonnoziti-Casseruola), seeming to re-establish the boundaries between actor ...”

“... Proust, and fastened on a passage from A la recherche that released him from his feelings of self-contempt by acknowledging the pervasiveness of human moral frailty – especially the ‘indifference to the sufferings one causes’ as ‘the terrible and permanent form of cruelty’. However badly he might need to cultivate a façade of ...”

“... Saudi-protecting demeanour of the Texas oil barons, shocking though all that is, but the everyday self-certainty that makes America a fighting force against other cultures and ways of life.3 The delegates have breathed a lot of this stuff into their lungs in recent years, but they wanted more. ‘The Muslims just hate us for our love of freedom,’ said a ...”

“... narrative that, for an entire decade, deflected criticisms aimed at an appallingly inept and self-defeating policy. Despite the bitter protests of Cohen and a handful of his colleagues (such as Peter Reddaway and Jerry Hough), the mytho-poetic concept of ‘transition’ became, and to some extent remains, ‘a near orthodoxy’. Most Americans not only ...”

“... opinions about the state of the game etc, all while I just sat there. Damn. So I go upstairs and self-righteously listen to the game on the radio. Sri Lanka are all out for 162. 31 May. France 0 Senegal 1 in the opening match. This is officially the biggest shock of all time, though the previous winners have in fact won the opening game only twice in the ...”