“... double agents. At Camp X in Toronto, MI6 officers instructed Americans ‘in the arts of sabotage, self-defence and secret codes’. In exchange, the FBI turned a ‘blind eye to British activities on US soil’. Ian Fleming, posted to Washington, didn’t take to Hoover – ‘a chunky enigmatic man with slope eyes and a trap of a mouth’. British ...”

“... any of the large forces that affect a life, without giving them totalising authority over one’s self?The unacknowledged debt to naturalism and the silent faith in determinism feel like the deep spiritual background to the novels produced by my generation. In some respects, we live in an era of unprecedented freedoms and scientific information, and yet the ...”

“... social democratic reformism in the notion of Folkhemmet, the People’s Home, in Sweden; Nazism, self-described as die Bewegung, the Movement, in Germany; and in the United States the dynamic role of American communism in the unions and among intellectuals, forcing labour and social security reforms on a Democratic administration that of its own volition ...”

“... to Burden’s Maine cottage for a month every summer. What Luce calls Brzezinski’s ‘ferocious self-promotion’ was paying off.In June 1966, Brzezinski took a job at the Policy Planning Council in the State Department, where he aimed to promote his peaceful engagement strategy. This was not a retreat from the pursuit of victory in the Cold War. Brzezinski ...”

“... a marvellous child’ and a ‘little genius’, but the studio did little to nurture her self-esteem. They made her wear rubber discs to turn up the tip of her nose and removable tooth caps to fix her smile (these beauty rules were later referenced in A Star Is Born). They criticised her perfectly healthy teenage body until she starved herself enough ...”

“... the point at which computers become more intelligent than human beings; learn to self-program and self-improve; do so at speed and at scale; and lead humanity to a new era of, to use the latest hot term, abundance. Artificial general intelligence, or artificial superintelligence, creates a new era of cheap ...”

“... the efforts of some of the Founding Fathers, but penal codes were dramatically revised and made self-consciously less bloody than those of the mother country. The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ is another sign of the Founding Fathers’ commitment to the idea that a new sort of liberal polity demanded ...”

“... a leak, came down the centre aisle, waiting at the end of a pew until someone made room, his self-effacing behaviour and downcast eyes proclaiming him a person of some consequence humbled by the circumstances in which he currently found himself and which might have been allegorically represented on a ceiling, say (although not one of his), as Fame ...”

“... and her determination to make her argument accessible to those without any legal training is a self-consciously political act. Her introduction promises that legal terms will be explained as needed and directs the reader in addition to a useful glossary of such terms at the back; only on a very few occasions did I stumble across a word that eluded either ...”

“... he made Clarke his assistant and the paper’s general manager. Clarke was effective and self-effacing. He was in a good position to assess the new generation of Irish revolutionaries who came to New York. In 1907, he concluded that it was time for him to return to Ireland. The police noted the arrival of the ‘ex-convict and dynamiter’ while ...”

“... In a famous essay, one of the most acute self-critical reflections to emerge out of any of the youthful revolts of the 1960s, Murat Belge – a writer unrivalled in his intelligence of the political sensibility of his generation – told his contemporaries on the Turkish left, as yet another military intervention came thudding down over more than a decade of ardent hopes, that they had misunderstood their own country in a quite fundamental way ...”

“... military and introducing a more pluralist conception of national belonging – has given way to self-flagellation. But the democratising potential of the AKP was uncertain from the start, and many who count themselves on the left never embraced it. The AKP shared with parties across the Turkish political spectrum, from Kemalists to right-wing ...”

“... military intervention cynically derided as Libya’s clients doing their duty to their patron, a self-serving judgment that was unfair to South Africa in particular. That the Arab League, whose support for a no-fly zone was invoked by London, Paris and Washington to claim Arab legitimation of Nato’s intervention, had a membership almost entirely confined ...”

“... financially, and – in terms of the poetry – everybody was imitating everybody else. A sort of self-parodying was going on, and it had become a bit ridiculous. And the combative side of things had become marooned; by then our little war had been lost, the encroaching barbarians and popsters were now getting mainstream attention, publicised all over the ...”

“... only state where I saw a sign reading ‘Trump Country’), the strenuous empathy, the ritual self-flagellation, the extreme vocal kabuki were easy to hear as an ongoing provocation to anyone not fully on board with the programme. I couldn’t turn from that relentless decorousness to the resentment and paranoia on offer at other frequencies without ...”