“... 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 ...”

“... that the quiet on Gaza’s border was primarily the result of Israeli deterrence and Palestinian self-interest. Israel therefore saw little incentive in upholding its end of the deal. In the three months following the ceasefire, its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the ...”

“... and clubs in the London of the 1620s. Some of it evokes provincial intimacies rather than courtly self-display. Herrick laments the death of his spaniel Tracy, and bewails the loss of a finger. There are Devonian touches in poems written after 1630: several of his epigrams about dodgy low-life characters give them names found among families in the South ...”

“... their parasitic absence of function and common cultural ideal, la cour et la ville merged into a self-contained, homogenous society.’ That’s a lot to learn from a few key words, and the interest here is precisely in the social distinctions that can be drawn through close attention to language in context. Words are historical witnesses, we uncover their ...”

“... but it can’t be said that we really know him. A life has been filled in for us, but not a self. He remains as unknowable at the end as he was at the beginning, and indeed seems to leave the book as randomly and as unexpectedly as he entered it. Sebald deliberately layers his narrative, so that Austerlitz is difficult to get close to. Jacques tells his ...”

“... to objection too, and not only because even those happily free of the Protestant tic for psychic self-urtication may agree that present consumption should sometimes be deferred in favour of investment for the future. In fact, the full-on now-for-now view may be not just non-obvious, but even mildly touched. In a celebrated thought experiment, Robert Nozick ...”

“... held out against the odds in our “Finest Hour”, the British risk falling into a state of self-delusion which tells them that their institutions are above compare, that their country is somehow eternal.’ The English ‘in particular are blissfully unaware that the disintegration of the United Kingdom began in 1922, and will probably ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in communal, single-sex accommodation, just like soldiers in a regular army. Filled with ideas of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, they did as they were told. (The celibacy rule is to this day so tightly enforced that there are separate times for men and women to use Camp Ashraf’s petrol station.) Members were urged to transfer their passions from their former ...”

“... had managed to ensure that 84 per cent of its profits came to Britain. In 1933, Reza Khan, a self-educated soldier who had made use of the postwar chaos to grab power and found a new ruling dynasty (much to Mossadegh’s disgust), negotiated a new agreement with APOC, which turned out to be remarkably like the old one. During the Second World ...”

“... about the truest form of Christian worship, his advice was clear: ‘search the scriptures thy self,’ he said, with ‘constant meditation upon what thou readest, & earnest prayer to God to enlighten thine understanding’. He was convinced the Bible was, essentially, a sacred text, and he sought to honour his maker by studying it closely, every ...”

“... rarely fully admit to themselves or others the degree to which they rely on secondary and self-interested sources. The problem is compounded because people caught up in newsworthy events often convince themselves that they know more than they do. Survivors of suicide bombings in Baghdad would describe to me in minute detail the bomber’s facial ...”

“... and military dictatorship.’ The young Marxist intellectual John Cornford was rather more self-possessed: ‘I came out with the intention of staying a few days, firing a few shots, and then coming home. It sounded fine, but you just can’t do things like that. You can’t play at civil war, or fight with a reservation you don’t mean to get ...”

“... after the surrender of Moscow was ‘vibrant and sincere’. It was also eccentric, unfocused and self-serving. Rather than embracing the officious and ceremonial Orthodox tradition in whose name he claimed to speak, Alexander succumbed to a sequence of enthusiasms: table-shaking spiritualism, Pietist mysticism, pan-Christian ecumenism and eventually, at the ...”

“... and, even if they’re not, a significant proportion of the voting population will agree with that self-evaluation. Lubbers traces the career of a spy working for the intelligence firm Hakluyt (the firm Neil Heywood advised before he was murdered in China in 2011). Over a period of two decades, Manfred Schlickenrieder spied on revolutionary groups throughout ...”