“... means Covid-free, ‘red’ means immediate hospitalisation, ‘yellow’ means self-quarantine at home) was when I went to see Tenet at the cinema. I’d managed to dodge using this code for a long time, even when visiting hospitals (ID required) or checking in to hotels (ID and facial scan required). At the cinema, the seats around me were ...”

“... social anthropology in the mid-1990s, it seemed to me that I was joining a discipline committed to self-flagellation, most of which was undertaken in bad faith. In lecture after lecture it was explained that the subject was inherently racist and unscientific, and that its principal authors were all compromised in one way or another. Yet at the same time my ...”

“... War was the fault of overmighty superstates. And the traditional Scottish virtues of thrift and self-reliance flourished best in small businesses and small towns. This ethos underpinned the party’s anti-EEC stance during the 1970s (the SNP’s rhetoric then was curiously similar to the language it employs today, except for the prepositions: ‘Must these ...”

“... they must have done so with few illusions. They knew their farewells might be permanent. Self-sacrifice and penance characterised the ladies no less than their lords. It is small wonder that a new genre of crusader songs, chansons de départie, voiced the anxiety of parting and the heartbreak of absence. Henceforth the body must live without its ...”

“... and that Ferdinand Sr founded the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As well as these self-serving lies, conspiracy theories abounded. It was said that the CIA, the Vatican and Filipino oligarchs collaborated to oust the family from power. Millenarian fantasies, too, went viral. One claimed that Marcos Sr was bequeathed tons of gold by a secretive ...”

“... the narrator’s father (only the fourth was ‘ever shot’). Even The Lazarus Project (2008), a self-declared novel, proceeds in parallel strands.What all these fictions have in common is a commitment to multiplicity. One character ‘launches into monolithic monologues’ – the opposite, it’s clear, of what a person ought to do. The narrator in ...”

“... the middle of Astrid’s early morning stream of consciousness, left to find our own bearings. The self-conscious opening recalls Hotel World, where a dead chambermaid speaks from beyond the grave: ‘Here’s the story; it starts at the end.’ Smith uses the same sort of trick in ‘The Universal Story’, the first story in The Whole Story and Other Stories ...”

“... screenwriter who has a violent, if not murderous, edge. No other film used Bogart’s hostility or self-loathing so well. The loneliness must have been spurred by the great embarrassment in Bogart’s public life. In 1947, he had been part of the Committee for the First Amendment, an attempt to challenge Washington over its paranoid pursuit of communists in ...”

“... among the bourgeoisie had begun to undermine. Energetic new forces, struggling for the right to self-development, were on a collision course with the feudal system. For Marx and Jaurès, the bourgeoisie led the revolution and brought about the destruction of the Ancien Régime’s institutions. Furet regarded this as a ‘Marxist ...”

“... as it is supposed to, but only another ‘I’, not so much the truth beneath the travelling self as the other half of a seriously split story.Elsewhere, even when the ‘I’, still vaguely maritime, is openly sorry for itself – ‘My sad heart slobbers at the poop’ – something else is going on. The form of ‘The Tortured Heart’ requires some ...”

“... the pit, and before the violent interruption of the strike, mining settlements were to an extent self-policed.The word​ ‘backbone’ is also used in Gildea’s book by Heather Wood, from Easington in County Durham, to describe the role of women in mining communities. She reflects on her family’s experience: her grandfather was killed in a fatal pit ...”

“... whom speak dialects of the Romani language, while Sinti (and in France, Manouche) is the preferred self-designation in Germany and neighbouring countries. Official census figures are unreliable: Roma often don’t want to identify themselves for fear of discrimination. Some of the largest Romani minorities live in Central and Eastern Europe, among them ...”

“... USSR is not subject to the logic of imperialism’, Professor Miliband believes it to be self-evident that fears of Soviet expansionism are ‘no more than reactionary ideological warfare’. Finally, the essay on the plight of the Labour Party discusses whether activists should try to transform the party or whether they should form ‘a new ...”

“... in countries where the extermination of European Jews had little direct influence. The mature and self-critical way in which Germany – in contrast to, say, Japan or Italy – has dealt with the commemoration of the crimes committed in its name has led to exhortations to ‘learn from the Germans’. All this has enhanced the reputation of early 21st-century ...”

“... and extraction that characterised Britain’s colonial ventures, challenging the chauvinism and self-congratulation that was for so long the dominant mode.How should today’s multicultural British public respond to events that took place centuries ago but continue to reverberate? The cultural critic Michael Rothberg proposes the term ‘implicated ...”