“... leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1978, began a guerrilla war in 1984, claiming the Kurds’ right to self-determination within (this was always stressed) the framework of a democratised and demilitarised Turkish state. By ‘democratisation’ Kurds mean the repeal of laws used to harass minorities or to deny them basic political rights. The constitution, for ...”

“... than those in the Cameroon . . . Africans are not children. We are not here to use them for our self-fulfilment. We are here to help the patients into developing their responsibility as human beings . . . We are not looking for gratitude. We want them to get cured, whenever possible, and then to forget us afterwards . . . It would be good if your Jesuit ...”

“... in Wiltshire. Genealogy often gets short shrift from professional historians; it’s seen as self-indulgent and myopic, obsessed with the idea of origins. But as the branches proliferate, individuals become families; families become neighbourhoods and groups; groups become classes. The records are impossible to fathom unless you come up for air and take ...”

“... sense it represented a rearguard local engagement between arts intellectuals and Cambridge’s self-confident natural scientists, well on the way to their 83 Nobel prizes, who knew that the future greatness (and funding) of the university would essentially be in their hands. Probably nothing irritated arts dons more than the scientists’ certainty that ...”

“... for DVDs, and chat to each other electronically rather than go to a bar. In an increasingly self-centred society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading. This is not to say that the book is doomed. But publishers will surely have to change the way they do ...”

“... his friendless sojourn in England is not dispelled by his sexual enterprises, described in chill, self-deprecating detail. He is far from finding for himself the style of life he thinks appropriate to an artist – a style coldly impassioned, licentious and creative. On the contrary, he is ‘afraid of writing, afraid of women’. At the end of Youth he is ...”

“... led by Ngo Dinh Diem, known at the time thanks to the global circulation of photographs of self-immolating monks, are a case in point. The majority of Western observers in the 1960s and later, who saw the conflict through a Cold War lens, perceived religion as a minor element in these protests. Diem’s Catholicism was widely known but seen as a ...”

“... republic could last for ever, but the more they strove to attain that, the quicker they invited ...”

“... liver damage from alcohol, and COPD from smoking, and other chronic illnesses of unhappiness and self-neglect. When the first Trainspotting film came out in 1996, I went to see it on my own at the Brixton Ritzy. It was everything people say it was, but it didn’t do much for me. A brilliant piece of multidimensional brand strategising, I felt it was, ideas ...”

“... a libertarian, and said: ‘Trump is not part of the corrupt establishment. A total outsider. Self-funded his primary campaign. Didn’t take money from Goldman Sachs and the corrupt banks like every other candidate. Isn’t owned and operated by anyone but himself. Isn’t part of either corrupt “party”. Isn’t a politician. Doesn’t use political ...”

“... agreement made Northern Ireland into ‘a kind of mini EU, a polity that runs, not on unilateral self-assertion, but on painful compromise and awkward consensus’. This isn’t Foster’s style. Her election strategy was to present people with a choice: unionist dominance or republican dominance.The crocodiles bit back. After the election a grim-faced ...”

“... of a union threatened by insurgencies in the resource-rich borderlands. Their vision of a self-supporting state, free from foreign intervention, was reified in the Burmese Road to Socialism, the blueprint for a command economy based on Buddhism, autarky and astrology that impoverished the country. The Rohingyas were ethnically ...”

“... of an awareness that ‘oaths and vows are … means not just of assurance but of deception and self-deception.’ And the question keeps recurring. ‘Does binding language bind?’ Yes, but it is ‘naively unhistorical’ to ‘assume that binding language ought always to bind’. Shylock himself is defeated by his own ‘unbindable binding ...”

“... Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela formed Opec – a global cartel of oil producing nations self-consciously modelled on the Texas Railroad Commission (even employing former TRC consultants on retainer). They began to experiment with production agreements and export quotas. When the United States set itself at odds with Arab nations in the 1973 Yom ...”

“... novels, presents rape as a therapeutic solution to female frigidity. In 2014, the novelist (and self-identified Vonnegut fan) Kathleen Founds wrote, in a piece for Buzzfeed, that the story embraces ‘the myth that a woman who dresses provocatively shouldn’t be surprised if a man forces her to have sex. The myth that women unconsciously desire to be ...”