“... was weakening and that their campaign should therefore be intensified. Yet this terrorism is self-defeating, because its persistence is one reason why Britain cannot abandon Northern Ireland. Britain is in any case bound by the treaty to make no constitutional changes without majority consent in Northern Ireland – a crucially important fact to which ...”

“... American living in England and France and dreaming of the frontier, the second by a self-described ‘man without a country’, an American brought up in England and Ireland who, writing in Los Angeles, longed for the country from which he had exiled himself. We are undergoing a Chandler revival. The Library of America has published his complete ...”

“... a remarkable conversion, turning for inspiration, like the early Christians, to the son of a self-employed carpenter. When this expedient failed, the Tories discovered a more plausibly messianic figure in the person of a grocer’s daughter, who erratically fulfilled some of the relevant prophecies by driving virtually everyone except the moneychangers ...”

“... look at the astonishing way Laetitia recounts it. Such a mixture of blood and bustle, authorial self-congratulation and familial quarrelling, of pathos and ‘Hock and Sack mix’d’ has not been compounded since literature began. Mrs Pilkington’s story shows how easy it was for a man to commit all kinds of sins within a marriage, and in getting out of ...”

“... Lama quotes Candrakirti’s doctrine that animals are afflicted by the same false notion of the self that prevents enlightenment in human beings – a possibility which few of us will have mulled over on our own initiative – yet the same medieval Indian thinker also has important if extremely difficult things to say on the nature of reality. For the past ...”

“... in football began with the Hillsborough tragedy of April 1989. Hillsborough was the result of a self-fulfilling Thatcherite prophecy. The Tories were determined on a crack-down against hooligans; the police were paranoid and, as a result, they failed to operate effectively. The disaster was caused ‘not by hooliganism but by football’s political desire ...”

“... circle but hopelessly excluded from it – is wholly deaf to the note of frustration and self-disgust which often underlies his desperate rhetorical clowning. Nonsense, though, can offer a nightmare vision of a senseless universe just as readily as an idyllic escape into pure play (at its best it may do both at once: The Goon Show was both a ...”

“... All the conventional arguments, about great-power tyranny and the ‘socialist camp’, or about self-determination v. ‘giving ammunition to the enemy’, were gone over as a matter of course. Somewhere in there, but waiting for an idiom in which to be unambivalently uttered, was an expression, or affirmation, of human and civil rights as a good thing in ...”

“... you see that a very different process is at work, in which the arms lobby on each side has self-interestedly sought capital and bureaucratic advantage while enlisting its counterpart on the other side as a justification for its own ambition. In other words, they enjoy a mutually profitable partnership. In the early 1960s the US navy’s newly ...”

“... effects of different policies – school closures, social distancing, shielding of the elderly and self-isolation of symptomatic individuals – and of combinations of them were simulated by adjusting the average number of contacts. The most effective single strategy, shielding the elderly, still resulted in 220,000 deaths and a need for 120,000 ICU beds, as ...”

“... critics aided and abetted by the painter. But does all this matter much? He hangs well in his self-made private angst academy.Craxton wasn’t good at angst, or feuds. Baffled as well as hurt, he allowed himself to become obsessed. Natasha Spender recalled that the rupture and Freud’s attempt to ‘ruin his reputation … poisoned Johnny’s whole ...”

“... studies funded by governments and charities. The bias towards positive results has become self-perpetuating: when three-quarters or more of the papers published report positive findings, there is a strong incentive to avoid negative results, or to avoid writing them up.The worry is that scientific processes have been undermined by perverse incentives ...”

“... the most ardent exponents of the devotio moderna – but privileged observers. Mary’s measured self-possession is astonishing. She raises her right hand, to silence the archangel (and us), and prepares to turn back to her book. There is nothing quite like it in Renaissance Italian art.Because of the gaps in the documentation, art historians have tended to ...”

“... on the excessive weight of the state sector, and recommended a relaxation of restrictions on self-employment and small business. The liberalisations carried out by China and Vietnam in the 1980s – with the aim of creating a ‘socialist market economy’, or ‘socialist-oriented’ in Vietnam’s case – were seen as parallels for Cuba’s ...”

“... of this, while if there are ultras who see any form of close engagement with literary texts as self-evidently a part of capitalism’s smokescreen, they aren’t likely to be persuaded otherwise by being made to read a few admiring paragraphs about the author of Practical Criticism. It is quite true that Richards’s ‘experiments in applied ...”