“... 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 ...”

“... Stopping myself rejoining in order to react to this exceptional political event took considerable self-restraint. The moment I came closest to cracking wasn’t in response to the events themselves, though, but when I was tasked with managing my university department’s social media profile and came across this tweet by a prominent conservative ...”

“... intimately relevant to the understanding of the paintings. Indeed the landscape in this case was self-consiously shaped by the artist’s aesthetic, made to look like a Monet painting so that Monet could paint it. But it is only in the rarest of instances that a writer’s house discloses anything so immediately pertinent to the achievements that have ...”

“... as in a hospital or a prison (Solzhenitsyn’s The Third Circle). Or the island may be moral, self-constituted by a literary clique (Point Counter Point), by a group of like-thinking, semi-political bohemians (Les Chemins de la Liberté), by a cell of revolutionaries (Man’s Fate). What is involved is always a contest of faiths. The debates on the magic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pedal extremities really are obnoxious.’ His is the compensatory pomposity of insecure, self-inflating people everywhere, from preachers to police who have just ‘apprehended the alleged perpetrator’. The highfalutin’ tag is mordant, too, if Waller intends to demonstrate that the shallow ‘lookist’ he’s playing, whose grammar is black ...”

“... death comes in the last paragraphs of Brave New World. After an orgy of sexual riot followed by self-flagellating disgust, John the Savage, who is too good for the new world, strings himself up in the Surrey countryside: ‘Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east.’Why did ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to increase owners’ profits since the Luddites protested against mechanical looms. Airports have self check-ins; supermarkets have self check-outs; roads and bridges have, in place of toll-takers, technology that reads your licence plate. Customer service phone numbers connect you to digital operatives and a host of other ...”

“... account as a complex if partial portrait of a man: incomplete, tendentious, unreliable, at times self-contradictory – but whose biography isn’t? Julius Caesar emerges from Suetonius’ portrait (as from other sources, including his own writings) as a man who liked to move fast and break things, who possessed both the means and the inclination to conquer ...”