“... as being ‘much taller than any building I ever crashed into in Paris’. He was a finely ironic self-dramatist, too, scheduling the first trial of Airship No. 2 for 11 May 1899 – the Feast of the Ascension. Paris, unsurprisingly, adored him. In 1901, at the height of his fame, a newspaper described him as the city’s ‘god’, and noted the homophony ...”

“... display that is the source of so much American humour was in evidence, always with an edge of self-mockery. Since our 1966 trip, there has been enormous cultural progress, wrought by the internet, TV, jet travel and the growth in higher education. Every motel now offers an email connection. There are yellow ribbons, signifying support for US ...”

“... of treason there fashioned Was tried for his treachery, the most true upon earth – which, self-evidently, won’t do. O’Donoghue then quotes Marie Borroff’s translation: The knight that had knotted the nets of deceit Was impeached for his perfidy, proven most true This is better, making more sense of the last phrase, and also, like ...”

“... who rejected her. These and other inventions brought in to serve ‘a narrative of racial self-help and uplift’ are patiently and politely demolished by Hutchinson. One example of his way of unstitching arguments knitted to fit an ideological pattern concerns Nella’s period in the early 1920s as a librarian at an uptown branch of the New York ...”

“... the disparate strands of conservatism were unified by the revival of the Cold War. Even the most self-interested aspects of conservative politics – lowering taxes on the rich, stopping unions from organising – became associated with a moral struggle against regimentation, bureaucracy and stultifying totalitarianism; even the bloodiest and most sordid ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Nations so unimportant? In the first number of the Edinburgh Review, launched in 1755 in a self-conscious attempt to press Edinburgh writers on the world, Alexander Wedderburn (later lord chancellor) listed two obstacles that held up Scottish literary improvement: a lack of both a ‘standard of language’ and a tradition of good printing. As it ...”

“... in the cooler design manners of recent years, something less absolute – creams, cloud-greys, the self-effacing neutralities of MDF and cement. Such backdrops are the stalls, and bright colours are the goods. They are the quintessential sign behind shopping, browsing, culture-sampling and tourism. You might read the Home Office street front as an aspirational ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is it kind like a worker ant, like one of our own skin cells, programmed in earlier aeons to be self-sacrificing without choice? Or is it kind in the way that people are kind: innate inclination shaped by social learning, with the implication that other courses of action are possible? Of course the ape, or the human being, who learns a local custom may ...”

“... hard times. The son asks his mother what she believes. She gives him a file the father kept of his self-justifications. ‘What did I think?’ she says in reply to his demand. ‘He weighed every sentence. They couldn’t have used a single word to lay a trap for him.’ The son breaks in: ‘He copied paragraphs directly from the penal code. He copied them ...”

“... change decolonisation brought to the overcutting of forests or the commitment to unwise and often self-defeating hydrological projects. Whoever governed, short-sighted developmentalism ruled. This is a critical book but not a polemic. McNeill is fair-minded in trying wherever possible to quantify his arguments, and is willing to ask what would have happened ...”

“... principles and pressures they couldn’t resist. Two principles came with Woodrow Wilson: national self-determination, in its unqualified form the source of much difficulty then and plenty since; and ‘open diplomacy’, a contradiction in terms credible only to the inexperienced but music to the ears of the demagogic. The most damaging pressure came from the ...”

“... allowing him to face the statue of the Commander with such courage, Molière seemed to exceed his self-imposed brief to attack the singers, not the song. What conviction drove him to fight a cause which endangered himself and imperilled his actors? Scott, concerned primarily with the emotional truth about Molière, shows much less curiosity about his beliefs ...”

“... lives, helps them; and it is not for her or for any other outsider to suggest that they may be self-deceived, or ill-informed politically, or psychologically naive. She keeps to herself her scepticism when her interviewees themselves proudly invoke the tradition of an immemorial Russian stoicism to explain their own or others’ capacity to live through ...”