“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”