“... the book being translated, omitted because it dealt with the 1968 student unrest in Paris (though self-censorship did nothing to pre-empt censorship from outside), in which the author argued that groups act as an amplifier of individual possibility, so that some crowds loot, rape and murder, while others display a level of heroism inaccessible to any single ...”

“... stopping people from finding out God’s truth for themselves. In the late 1540s, the much more self-consciously Protestant government of Henry’s son, Edward VI, delivered the coup de grâce to the old system. It closed and confiscated the endowments of the thousands of chantries where non-monastic priests still celebrated masses for souls. In doing so it ...”

“... Xerxes begins with a famous largo, ‘Shade as it never was’ (Ombra mai fu), sung by the self-same King of Kings to his beloved: a plane tree. Aelian, a collector of amazing historical facts, provides the fullest account of this bizarre episode: That Xerxes fellow was a clown … he was slavishly devoted to a plane tree, as if the tree was something ...”

“... back beyond the white-bearded maker of images of luxuriousness to the wild-man-of-art shown in the self-portrait of 1906 and to be reminded that – as one soon learns from the letters he wrote to his son Pierre in the 1930s and 1940s (quoted in John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son) – even the old Matisse was far from the calm, masterful presence one ...”

“... innovations that would spawn entirely new technology-based industries for the Boston region. A self-consciously hybrid creation, combining elements of research university, polytechnic and (last and least) liberal arts teaching college, MIT was not unique among 19th-century American institutions of higher education in combining such forms and purposes. In ...”

“... the Soviet Union and the market economy – no longer “there”, but not yet “here”’.3 A self-professed ‘market fundamentalist’ in the 1990s, he subsequently realised that ‘in Russia, the source of money is not entrepreneurial talent … money is born from power.’ His best-known campaigns have involved buying shares in a well-connected ...”

“... elaborate superstructure of American newspapers to develop. The well-staffed offices, the air of self-conscious seriousness shading into pomposity, the tendency to file what from a British point of view always seemed several hundred words too much – all these features of American papers were underpinned by the easy money of monopoly-based classified ...”

“... became a well-known writer under her married name, Winifred Peck). The family ethos was strong, self-mythologising even, and had to do with being ‘brilliantly clever’ – all but ‘poor Ethel’ went to Oxford or Cambridge – and ‘distinguished by alarming honesty, caustic wit, shyness, moral rigour, willpower, oddness and powerful banked-down ...”

“... heroines are often isolated and bullied by the coarser people around them, but she was too self-aware to stack the deck in favour of the misfit every time. A passing reference to Eleanor’s mother describes her ‘hysterical insistence’ that all the bad things happening to their family were ‘due to malicious, backbiting people on the block who had ...”

“... handling of the bonus issue this year. Goldman Sachs clearly thought they were exercising heroic self-denial by awarding themselves a compensation pool amounting to a mere $16.2 billion. Haiti’s total GDP is $7 billion, and even before the earthquake one child in eight died before its fifth birthday; imagine Goldman turning over half its trough to Haiti in ...”

“... of government. But this system collapses before the end of the play into something more simple and self-enclosed. ‘The dead do not belong to you,’ Tiresias tells Creon, ‘nor to the gods above.’ There are moments – and death (or more properly decay) is one of them – that belong neither to sacred nor to secular law, but to themselves. Antigone has ...”

“... of Kagame’s entourage. Rwanda severed diplomatic ties with France. Much was written about the self-aggrandising investigative magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, and about France’s hostility to the RPF regime. The Spanish judiciary, widening an investigation into the murder of some Spanish missionaries, reached even more grievous conclusions. In 2008, a ...”

“... the orphanic with the orphic; traumatic exposure or isolation is translated into an occasion for self-making or shady pleasure. Smith’s mother died from heart disease in 1919 when she was 16. ‘The last minute when you are dying, that may be a very long time indeed,’ Pompey writes in Novel on Yellow Paper. ‘So now it is all over, it is all over and ...”

“... a defining moment, the point to which some enduring bitterness, or widescreen tragedy, or fond self-regard traces its poignant origin. The middle of this memory is much like any other: a series of snapshots, half-remembered conversations over lunch or tea breaks, fleeting glances, smiles and half-smiles, assumptions, hopes, doubts. Sometimes those ...”

“... who could lay for the Republicans the golden egg of the presidency, she brimmed with the inflated self-assurance of the small-world conqueror, and held a national audience in the palm of her hand as she recited the same confident platitudes that served her so well in Alaska. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and McCain and his advisers should have left ...”