“... unwashed ashtray. The phone was still high up on the wall by the front door. I saw my 23-year-old self talking to Italo Calvino. I was wearing navy blue wool trousers and a white shirt. ‘Yes. I think an interview will be all right,’ Calvino was saying. ‘What is the best time for you?’ ‘Around five o’clock?’ ‘Good. We can meet at the Caffè ...”

“... described him as ‘a man of strong will, a very hard worker, an exceptional organiser and a self-proclaimed friend of the Soviet Union’, even if he was also ‘cunning, deceitful and ruthlessly repressive’. But the KGB was equally clear that Amin had to go. In their view he wasn’t capable of creating a popular coalition that could resist the ...”

“... with an independent kingdom of Scotland threatened to undermine England’s sovereign sense of self. Constitutionally, the Anglo-Scottish connection was of a markedly different character from either the Anglo-Welsh or even the Anglo-Irish relationship. Seventeenth-century Englishmen, indebted to a unitary conception of the state, could not find a way to ...”

“... the West, finally joining the EU in 2004. Now, almost a decade on, it is led by the charismatic, self-declared ‘right-wing plebeian’ Viktor Orbán, a man whom critics charge with the ‘Putinisation’ of Hungary. Thanks to his government’s undermining of the rule of law, Hungary risks being the first EU member state to be sanctioned for violating ...”

“... against corruption at the Bolshoi.’ Lunkina herself left the theatre last September, to live in self-imposed exile in Ontario with her husband, the producer Vladislav Moskalev, and their children. Threats connected to Moskalev’s business dealings prompted the move. Moskalev had his own hypothesis about the attack on Filin. In his view, it stemmed from ...”

“... have surrendered. Those who are under thirty, and less persistent than Snowden in their efforts of self-education, can hardly remember a time when things were different. The year 2008 brought a remission for Snowden, because the Obama campaign promised a turn away from the national security state and the surveillance regime. He cherished the warmest hopes for ...”

“... bit-part who doesn’t know when he should leave the stage. While he is subject to fantasies of self-betterment, he’s also a disquieting parody of those fantasies – and a reminder of what they might cost. In Sketches by Boz, ‘progress’ is used in a Hogarthian, not a Victorian sense: ‘one of our principal amusements is to watch the gradual progress ...”

“... of the usurers. A Russian who is trained in a Western company starts to think differently: self-love is at the root of Western rationality. That is not our way. You have been sending us your consumer culture. I don’t think of Washington or London as being in charge. Satan commands them. That is why you want to bomb Syria, the homeland of ...”

“... to Every Purpose under Heaven. We see him accompany his children to another child’s birthday, self-hatingly pose for photographs for a newspaper, conduct a long conversation about his personality and ethics in a pub with his friend Geir, attend and throw dinner parties, and sit like a ‘feminised’ male with his daughter on his lap at a music programme ...”

“... Africa, seemed to have returned. This is striking, since la Françafrique has been the object of self-critical pillorying for at least a decade in France and the French were the great detractors of the ‘war on terror’. So, after all the recriminations, are the French still neocolonial? Or have they finally rallied to the idea that waging war on ...”

“... was a buried current running through that telegraphic style, a style that never stopped for self-examination, didn’t bother to search for le mot juste, nor to make sure that the language was neat and tidy.’ The style was born in the al-Wahat prison camp in Egypt’s western desert, where thousands of political prisoners, Marxist and Islamist, were ...”

“... which Shapiro shares a few kisses and a grope with a woman he met on the plane, then cringes with self-loathing as a Hasid walks past him: ‘I realised … that without earlocks and a ritual garment one cannot be a real Jew … Had I worn such an outfit that night I wouldn’t have been exposed to those temptations.’ Lasdun didn’t return to the faith of ...”

“... Some suggest that there will never be a ‘DSM-6’, on the grounds that the whole endeavour is self-destructing. Don’t count on it. It is on the contrary likely that the manual will become more attuned to neurological causes as these gradually conquer more and more of psychiatry. The DSM is a living, organic creature, kept alive by myriad worker bees. At ...”

“... a career in the 1950s did it in the interval between the end of social stigma and the beginning of self-reproach. In that sense they never had it so ...”

“... themselves in court, seek to resolve issues by themselves, pay for services which support self-resolution, pay for private representation or decide not to tackle the issue at all’.* This is an argument not for modifying or reducing legal aid but for abolishing it, something the Treasury has wished it could do for half a century, but which the ...”