“... or promissory notes that would go begging in their own country. The Axial Age launches a self-reinforcing pact of coin and sword. Payment of soldiers in precious metal encourages further plunder of neighbouring lands for their bullion; conquest of these lands disrupts local economies functioning on credit and trust, as occupying powers demand that ...”

“... Abrams show in Kubrick: An Odyssey, owed his escape to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.Kubrick is a comprehensive Life. It yields, in orderly procession, almost every fact a scholar or a fan might want; and a fair number of motifs are traced between one film and another, and between Kubrick’s experience and what went into his ...”

“... purpose and experience in Vietnam and beyond, but only O’Brien’s book, a work of fiction, is self-consciously so. All three books were published near a date that has far more significance than the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam and the final, cataclysmic withdrawal of American forces from Saigon – 30 April 1975. April 30 1995 was also ...”

“... least by the Continental regime she most disliked, which sat in Rome. The otherwise impregnable self-confidence of The Downing Street Years falters disarmingly whenever its heroine comes to Europe. The titles of the chapters speak for themselves. The ordinary triumphal run – ‘Falklands: The Victory’, ‘Disarming the Left’, ‘Hat Trick’, ‘Not ...”

“... got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s stated in the book that Denis Brogan, fellow of Peterhouse, broadcaster and expert on the USA, used to boast that he had fucked in 46 of the 50 ...”

“... to see and touch, to believe in the humiliation of Vladimir Putin. There are tanks, a huge self-propelled howitzer and armoured troop carriers into whose burned-out insides everyone peeks to see if their occupants have left something of themselves behind. The hulks are both disturbing and ridiculous, redolent of death and of hubris. The great slabs of ...”

“... a union organiser; he had published his poetry here and there; he would turn out to be a nuanced, self-conscious diarist, often introspective, self-mocking, good on the absurdities he encountered, and not always laconic under fire. He had an excellent eye for detail. At the same time he was brusque and untutored in his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Edinburgh. She says it would have been easy enough to change her plans, but ‘my maternal self-esteem, precarious at the best of times, would have collapsed altogether if I turned into one of those parents who let their children down because of sudden work demands.’ She ignored the calls from Cook and the whips and went to the cinema. The boys hated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the voice of Butler’s few but marvellous essays: laidback but crisp and clear, the voice of a self-confessed ‘news junkie’ and far-sighted African American intellectual who grew up through Project Mercury and the March on Washington, the Watts uprising and Vietnam, the moon landing and the assassination of Martin Luther King; whose inspiration for ...”

“... may recently have become a minority not simply because of demographics but because fewer people self-identify as white. The Serbs of Yugoslavia, the Sunnis of Iraq, the Muslim Moro of Mindanao and the Assamese of India are used as examples of ‘sons of the soil’ groups who feel they deserve better treatment than incomers and outsiders, and are psychic ...”