“... the Dutch Supreme Court. It would be easy to conclude that the judges were taken in by a master of self-publicity, particularly when you look at a photo taken the following year: Reve with his arms around a real donkey, kissing its nose and looking knowingly into the camera. But what’s interesting – and this is one of the things that makes him more than ...”

“... may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the Platonic ladder that leads to self-understanding … If marriage is, as Mill suggested, a political experience, then discussion of it ought to be taken as seriously as talk about national elections.Marriages set two imaginations to work constructing narratives about experience presumed to be ...”

“... travel north of the border. They hate him there. Second, breaking the machinery of government is self-defeating for any political leader who wants to build a lasting legacy. The point of playing by the rules is that those rules are still in place to bind your successors. Ignoring them cuts the chain that links the present to the future. Nothing endures that ...”

“... delicate balance of power collapsed in the third century when the widow of a local warlord, the self-titled Queen Zenobia, launched a campaign of expansion. She reached Antioch in the north and the borders of Egypt in the south before the Emperor Aurelian sacked her city in 273 ce, destroying its trading networks and reducing it to a minor Roman military ...”

“... amused expression curving her full lips; behind her are the banks of the Nile. Bold, unveiled, self-possessed, aglow with inner force, rather eerie, she does indeed seem to be projecting the greatest light into this artist’s dreams. It turns out that he was Mahmoud Saïd, the son of a former prime minister and the uncle of Queen Farida, wife of ...”

“... creatures so their hatchlings will have something to eat. Except the other way round, the old self feeding off the young one. All that was left would be the eyes, pleading, trapped behind the eyeholes. It’s a rather sophisticated thought for an eight-year-old to have, but then Smith doesn’t play by the rules and might argue, if arguing were her ...”

“... stalks them across Europe. Like all modern myths, the story of Dracula is over-determined and self-contradictory, a stew of obsessions and anxieties rich enough to withstand endless reheating. To some, Dracula is an occult book informed by the late Victorian taste for esotericism. It can be read as a parable of empire and its decline. It is a gift to ...”

“... was 16, to enrol at Duke University as a ‘desperately poor’ undergraduate, ‘romantically and self-indulgently lonely’. He graduated at the top of his class and went on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, graduating with a B.Litt, after writing the university’s first thesis on Joyce. When Kenner wrote to him in 1958 he was finishing a Harvard PhD on ...”

“... violation of the UN Charter, which forbids the unauthorised use of force except in situations of self-defence, will not be condemned by the Council because the US will cast (or threaten to cast) its veto. Condemnations from individual countries will be dismissed as statements that merely conceal – but do not deny – a growing acceptance that American ...”

“... overeating; and the restaurant, the now ubiquitous setting for the public display of private self-absorption. Restaurants gave people a place to go where they could ignore others, but also observe them. One could remain anonymous or be seen – at the latest place or at the best table. Unless, of course, one was condemned to play that other, equally ...”

“... and common sense alone. In that sense Perkin’s story is different from those of the often self-educated inventors who Samuel Smiles celebrated in the Lives of the Engineers. But Smiles would have understood and appreciated Perkin’s tenacity and competence, his skill as a chemical engineer and his abilities as a businessman, the determination with ...”

“... stone till water begins to drip through. The lake shrinks, and the prince in a moment of supreme self-sacrifice offers his body to plug the hole. When he is almost drowned, he is saved by the princess, whose tears are for the first time truly human, and are followed by rain. She regains gravity; the lake fills; the witch is buried in her flooded ...”

“... From her grandfather, an admirer of Marcus Garvey, she heard the message of racial pride and self-discipline, lessons reinforced at the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls. For a few years, she attended this institution for blacks founded after the Civil War by Northern missionaries, until the Klan ran the headmaster out of town and forced the school ...”

“... degree on victimhood at the hands of other countries, China is none too keen to fess up to its self-mutilations. There are no museums or memorials dedicated to the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine – together the cause of more than thirty million deaths – and academic or artistic work must follow the Party line precisely. Chinese historians do ...”

“... slaughter; that he ordered the genocidal bombing of Cambodia and Vietnam with B-52s for paltry and self-interested reasons; that he certainly connived in and probably gave the green light to the assassination attempt on Archbishop Makarios, to the Indonesian genocide in East Timor, all manner of atrocities in Chile, including the assassinations of Orlando ...”