“... colonised, wracked by a terrible fear of revealing his ‘inferiority’ to whites, prone to self-hatred and always ready to imagine a slight. Worse still, Mbeki was only an extreme example of a general tendency: the incoming African political elite may have espoused universal values and human rights, but the racial prejudice of this aspirant national ...”

“... story is the way she transforms her hero’s resistance to his religious destiny into a series of self-inflicted punishments that rival those suffered by early Christian saints at the hands of their persecutors. He fills his shoes with stones, blinds himself with quicklime, winds barbed wire around his torso. His landlady, who hopes, for some obscure ...”

“... for a million-person march in Bangkok. With Thaksin gone, his supporters have formed their own self-sustaining networks, which will probably survive even if he is no longer able to fund them. From exile, Thaksin promises: ‘I haven’t received justice and I will not give up.’Thailand’s globalised economy may lead to even greater inequality between ...”

“... view,’ McBride writes, ‘the penal code permitted the Ascendancy to admire its own confident self-portrait, undisturbed by the continuing challenge posed by the resilience of the majority faith in Ireland’. His aim is to counterpoint Ascendancy pomp and complaint with a portrait of, on the one hand, the resilience of Catholic life and, on the ...”

“... have shifted. Giustozzi argues that the Taliban realise their old position on education was self-defeating and lost them support, and the line is now being reversed. In Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, according to Tom Coghlan, one of Giustozzi’s contributors, people in September 2008 ‘reported a strikingly less repressive interpretation of the ...”

“... of savages’. The only stories most people wanted to hear were heroic tales of derring-do and self-sacrifice. Quite a cult developed around Franklin, with his widow as its high priestess: no longer merely the man who ate his boots, Franklin came to be celebrated as one of the empire’s great pioneers. In 1866 an eight-foot high bronze statue proclaiming ...”

“... that characterise these processes of ‘state evasion’. Scott agrees that ‘named tribes with self-consciousness of their identities do most certainly exist,’ but adds that ‘rather than existing in nature, they are a creative human construction – a political project – in dialogue and competition with other “tribes” and states.’ Here, he is ...”

“... the sociological together into a single argument. His feat was all the smarter for being highly self-conscious. In its course, the professor pushed his way forward through the history of palaeolithic studies, appraising and criticising predecessors, before borrowing from the philosopher Alison Wylie a name for his own method. He was ‘cabling’, he ...”

“... transcend suffering gave him another reason to remove himself from the music, to pursue an art of self-erasure. From 1946 to 1948 Cage worked on the piece that many still consider his masterpiece, the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, which used the same piano-as-percussion-orchestra technique he had pioneered with Syvilla Fort a decade earlier. This ...”

“... He agreed with his Christian friend in seeing religion in terms of Selbstdenken, or intellectual self-reliance, rather than anxious adherence to universal creeds. Truth, when it really mattered, was always local, provisional and idiosyncratic: or, in the words of a character in Lessing’s The Freethinker, ‘truth cannot be universally shared, any more than ...”

“... which usually changed considerably over time. Many of the early little magazines, far from being self-consciously ‘modernist’, were antiquarian throwbacks. Fin-de-siècle periodicals like the Yellow Book, the Chameleon and the Savoy took inspiration from William Morris, Charles Ricketts and other luminaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, favouring ...”

“... Twitter feed featuring responses like ‘Jonah Lehrer’s speech should be titled “Recognising self-deluded assholes and how to avoid them in the future”’ and ‘Rantings of a Delusional, Unrepentant Narcissist’. But no one demanded that he get raped and stabbed. And at least he had actually done something wrong. Stone and Sacco’s jokes were ...”

“... to a specific catchment area. Choice is a predominantly middle-class preoccupation, and becomes self-fulfilling: parents see their children’s good grades not as a foregone conclusion – the result of better nutrition, access to extracurricular activities and greater cultural capital – but as the result of their striving to secure places at the best ...”

“... now reappears in New York. So does booze, a topic to which Remarque fondly returns to the brink of self-parody; his characters, men and women, are always holding out a glass for more or exclaiming over the quality of the next bottle. In The Promised Land it’s vodka or cognac. During the doomed love affair in Arch of Triumph, Ravic and Joan drank Calvados in ...”

“... huge sums of money supporting the Nationalists. The Nazi regime was trying to make Germany as self-sufficient as possible through its policy of ‘autarky’, in preparation for the coming war in Europe. But it was short of important raw materials, many of which could be found in Spain. Franco and the Nationalists didn’t have enough hard cash to pay the ...”