“... Aristotle. The RaMBaM, meanwhile, appears to have had a very different project. He writes in a self-consciously archaic Hebrew reminiscent of the Mishnah, the ancient (second century ad) core of rabbinic Judaism from which the Talmud later developed. His codification of that Judaism is dogmatic, and he articulates, in his Commentary on the Mishnah, the ...”

“... had obstructed the peace process was wispy at best; but enough to drive the paranoid president to self-destruction. It transpires​ that Watergate – as The Nixon Tapes show – was not Nixon’s first major cover-up. In December 1971, he and his aides became aware of a concerted domestic espionage programme directed at the White House by his own chiefs of ...”

“... ignored him or laughed generously, not taking him seriously. It made him as I recall pompous and self-important. When he was wrong Doris and her friends never corrected him or explained, so he would make wild pronouncements and I was not kind or thoughtful enough to leave them alone at school, where he was with his peers not indulgent socialists. Peter is ...”

“... of popular movements, the mushrooming of democratic organs at the base, and the rise of centres of self-management.’ These movements would work in tandem with the political front, but they would also act as a check on it. Partyism must not override expressions of popular will. Syriza’s leaders have been wary of politicising citizen movements not only ...”

“... a philosophical and political universe filled with warring factions, where nuance, ambiguity and self-doubt are both boring and irrelevant. One final example of his selective reading is his discussion of the doyen of 17th-century heresy-hunters, the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. We are led to believe that Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the ...”

“... Max Wall, Vera Lynn, Ken Dodd and Bruce Forsyth. Shirley Bassey’s ‘suggestive lyrics and sassy self-confidence’, Major believes, are a direct legacy of Marie Lloyd and Bessie Bellwood. Music hall may have started out raucous, but it gradually became more refined. The early theatres presented young women dressed only in flesh-coloured body stockings and ...”

“... participate, and the only honest artistic register of its glare seems to be some form of gnarled, self-conscious, confrontational ...”

“... towards the conviction that Palestinian statehood could be achieved only if Israel’s self-defined security needs were met: an erroneous assumption based on a flawed understanding of Israel’s strategy. The emphasis on ‘trust-building’ with Israel has coloured the evolution of the political process since 2003. The general movement towards ...”

“... the romance, and gives Cleopatra due credit for brains and for a good politician’s sense of self-interest. It is a pleasure to find a history written by a non-specialist for a non-specialist audience that contains so little to criticise. It may not be quite as scintillating as Tom Holland’s Rubicon, still the best popular history of the late ...”

“... knew it who is disappearing. Those who are older than they are young make exaggeratedly impatient, self-deprecating jokes when they forget a name, a face or why it was they walked into a room. (Recent research from Notre Dame suggests that it may be passing through doorways which unframes the thought you had the second before – but I’ve just forgotten the ...”

“... or genocide were being committed. Unlike the EU and other regional bodies bound by economic self-interest, the AU was an exercise in sentiment and aspiration – the embodiment of an impulse towards unity. The high hopes of the independence years were revived, with judicious amnesia. At the founding OAU summit, the Togolese putschist Gnassingbé ...”

“... This was one theory. She found something saintly and crazed in his undertaking, an element of self-denial, an element of penance. Sit in the dark, revere the images. Were his parents Catholic?’ It’s a good question, and a hard one not to ask about the author as well (they were) because DeLillo’s constant recourse to religious language to describe ...”

“... modern representations, with all their unassimilable detritus, into the singularity of supposedly self-evident identities. If we think of The Island Princess’s ‘Moor priest’ as an ‘imam’, we might all too easily finesse the fact – noted by McManus – that he makes pantheistic references to ‘the gods’ and is addressed as ‘Don Governor’, a ...”

“... mask and an ‘improvised breechcloth’ to impress a girl called Diana. We learn that he was self-conscious around girls; that he was freckled and bookish and that he hated baked Alaska. Before we can get too close, though, there is another strange uncle or fruity ex-army officer to tell us about (‘I was suspicious of majors who didn’t smoke a ...”

“... seething.’ Witch-hunts tempt us to make something from history that never was: the self-congratulatory fables of the philosophes, or the twisted reports of Himmler’s Hexenforschung-Sonderkommando, or Eltingen’s statue of Katharina, or the fictional accounts of her life that either lionise or denigrate her (Arthur Koestler called her a ...”