“... less learned and less official travel writers began to describe the culture of Aleppo with the self-regarding swagger of a militia officer stationed in an English provincial town. In 1816, James Silk Buckingham (a future MP) devotes the first few thousand words of his account to the complaint that he has not been treated as a gentleman by the English ...”

“... Herbert Morrison, never stopped intriguing against him). Churchill, by contrast, was notoriously self-seeking and greedy for cash. He abandoned first the Conservative Party, then the Liberals, and when back with the Conservatives was consistent only in his disloyalty. ‘Anyone can rat,’ he is supposed to have gleefully declared, ‘but it takes a certain ...”

“... in the area around Baghouz six months later. The village finally fell on 23 March 2019, provoking self-congratulatory messages from Trump and other world leaders exulting over the destruction of the IS caliphate. Belief in its defeat was reinforced when the caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, blew himself up with a suicide vest on 27 October that year after he was ...”

“... revolutions of the previous century, on whose leaders – Garibaldi, Bolívar, Martí – Castro self-consciously modelled himself.Castro’s early reforms had a puritanical edge. The regime shut down brothels and casinos. Out of some lingering attachment to bourgeois morals, Castro insisted that all the guerrilla boyfriends and girlfriends of the Sierra ...”

“... that. And I expected to see myself do worse.’The stories circle the question of Fuckhead’s self-contradictory behaviour. One minute he helps a stranger home, the next he threatens to beat up a woman whose husband has sold him bad drugs. ‘Fuckhead’s very hostile but at the same time he’s worshipful,’ Johnson explained. ‘He displaces his hopes ...”

“... delays, and there have been reports of defendants getting to court late for hearings. Incidents of self-harm have increased by more than 4000 per cent since 2018 and guards routinely use violence to quell disorder. In one incident, captured by a body camera, a man collapsed after officers put him in a chokehold. ‘You’re not a very good actor,’ the deputy ...”

“... that had voted for it, and to pay the bills by unleashing a dynamic, innovation-driven, self-starting, post-EU economy. The problem was that he had no idea how to achieve any of this. ‘Levelling up’ meant everything and nothing. The strong medicine Cummings proposed to turbocharge innovation – including drastic reform of the civil service, and ...”

“... about the enlightened sexual philosophy of Master Batista); the tall, gorgeous, wildly self-destructive painter Vladimír; the obstreperous poet Bondy; the woman in red high-heeled shoes and a dainty parasol (‘that Parisian pastry topped with the whipped cream’ – his wife); the small town on the river, the brewery, Prague, the smithy, the ...”

“... bigger transitions in Septology – switches in time from the sexagenarian Asle to his childhood self or from one Asle to the other – are usually prefaced with an ‘I see’: should I ask Åsleik to put the chair in front of the window there, I think, but no, how can I even think that, of course Ales’s chair has to stay where it’s always been, how ...”

“... remark, which Christopher Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain boy.’ Griffith-Jones, who regularly advised the director of public prosecutions on ...”

“... in global terms, than Lutheranism. Unlike Lutheranism, it had a decisive impact on that self-regarding complex of offshore European islands where the majority population spoke a distinctive language called English, especially when many of these people crossed the ocean to North America. There is little to criticise in Gordon’s assured account. I ...”

“... prime minister, abandoned Spain’s long-standing recognition of Western Sahara’s right to self-determination. To the outrage of his leftist coalition partners, he endorsed Morocco’s plan for ‘autonomy’ in Western Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty. A ‘new era’ in Spanish-Moroccan relations commenced. It was soon felt on Mount Gurugu: the ...”

“... the Ciceronians, whose ‘reform’ of traditional Christian vocabulary he found both pompous and self-defeating. At the same time, he was not comfortable with un-classical usage, and would argue that, if it was possible for the translator of the Bible to correct alien forms with acceptable Latin on some occasions, it ought to be possible to do so thoughout ...”

“... to the body of commentaries produced by both their devotees and their critics, and contain as many self-deconstructing texts as ‘totalising’ ones. And while granting that canons do embody ‘traditions’, he points out that, without some equivalent of the notion of tradition, there would be no need for ‘the special forms of attention elicited by ...”

“... of liberal political institutions as oriented toward a provisional telos – a widely-shared but self-limiting consensus on the highest good achievable ... But this telos justifies a kind of tolerance foreign to the classical theological tradition.’ I have no quarrel with this. Unfortunately, moral diversity is lost to view in these worthy prescriptions ...”