“... averts its eyes from the past or licks its wounds. Both attitudes translate into paralysing self-consciousness. Once again, the realities on the ground – the ‘Africa of the Africans’ – do not count for much. French public opinion, which with rare exceptions did not object to the neo-colonialism of the trente glorieuses, is once again ...”

“... and since access to the elite means access to wealth, the cycle of elite formation is essentially self-sustaining and closed to outsiders. This is scarcely news. It is known now and it was known 50 years ago, but there has never been a serious will to do anything about it. The year of the Butler Education Act, 1944, also saw the publication of the Fleming ...”

“... Red River qualifies its epic mode by imputing it to Dunson’s – or to Texan, or to American – self-aggrandisement. The ending aside, the film achieves an epic grandeur unsurpassed among Westerns. Red River is a capitalist epic. The railroad, which in populist Westerns is usually the enemy, the corporation dispossessing the farmers, is in Red River a ...”

“... something to say, before you have wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery. Of course the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given.’ A word or two about this ‘bewildering minute’ will lead us to ask whether what the reader gives himself up to is necessarily his own. Eliot came upon the ...”

“... to be, the only way to balance the down side of the seesaw. Why the hell had I had those greedy, self-absorbed, terrifying parents if it wasn’t to have something to write about? It wasn’t exactly superstitious, nor overtly religious (now one and the same thing). It was a matter of what I had been given and why. What to do with it. That also sounds ...”

“... voting system, the unelected second chamber, the monarchy etc) and guarantees the right to self-determination of nations within the UK. This will not happen unless there is a grand remonstrance from below. Here the Scottish campaign for independence offers a good model. Tariq Ali After​ the 1979 referendum, which mustered too few ‘Yes’ votes to ...”

“... enlightening too, if not always in the advertised way. Margot Tennant had always possessed the self-confidence and judgmental sweep of someone born to great wealth and social prominence. Her family were pioneers of chemical bleaching. The Tennant plant outside Glasgow was the largest chemical works in the world at the time, and its towering chimney was a ...”

“... recorded Eurozone negotiations on a smartphone – all of this, on a charitable reading, was not self-promotion but an attempt to put pressure on the Eurogroup by influencing a European public which, alas, at this stage in its linguistic and cultural fragmentation, simply doesn’t exist. Varoufakis’s style was a break with the EU’s usual method of ...”

“... was Kimbanguism, an Africanised Christianity that swept Congo in the 1920s. Simon Kimbangu was a self-styled prophet at a time when it seemed that only a saviour could deliver the Congolese from oppression. Born in 1889, he attracted a following as a young man by performing miracles; an elderly Kimbanguist told Van Reybrouck that Kimbangu had made his ...”

“... minds. To start with, certainly, Arthur has the advantage, his suggestibility perhaps muffled by a self-absorption approaching autism: when everyone else is convinced that the air-conditioning has broken down, and that the heat is unbearable, he consults only his internal thermostat. When Lindemann circles closer, Arthur continues to track his ...”

“... if you do not behave yourselves as you ought’.There are also moments of compelling silliness and self-indulgence, where Swift goes above and beyond what’s strictly required by the political question. Explaining the concept of hyperinflation, the Drapier comes up with a run of images of debased coinage:If a ’squire has a mind to come to town to buy ...”

“... that it is impossible for black people to gain dignity without their white oppressors losing self. It may be that those Americans who emigrated joyfully and hopefully from the old America of the 1940s into the new America of civil rights were outnumbered by those who came as refugees from the past. ‘When we left the old country, we were forced to leave ...”

“... the time a long fought-for shift away from military rule is taking place? And what of the self-professed democrats who are rallying behind the mass expulsion of a vulnerable minority? A violent opposition towards this minority has cut across political divisions, with lauded figureheads of the erstwhile pro-democracy movement speaking of a willingness ...”

“... work involved in cross-pollinating wheat:If you want to cross two plants, you must prevent self-fertilisation by opening the tiny scales of the floret, and with a pair of fine tweezers plucking the three anthers without losing any of the pollen in the process. Then in a day or two, when the stigma is mature (it will resemble a plume), you add pollen to ...”

“... that lasted three days. The ‘ancient sickness’ seems to be something to do with illusion and self-deception, a desire for big, grand, romantic living when, actually, you are small and poor. Elisa’s mother, Anna, has it, and so has her father, Francesco, which is one reason both of them love Edoardo, a beautiful, spiteful young aristo. Edoardo dies of ...”