“... on doing so. It is political vanity to think that the governments of a moment, even at the most self-important of summits, can channel or deploy such mutations of the collective soul. On the way home, I found myself thinking of something said two years ago by Angelo Quattrocchi, an observer (and participant) at the more violent G8 spectacle in Genoa. He ...”

“... examined empirically a key feature of them: the characteristic chaos-theory property of ‘self-similarity’. If successive price changes are independent and follow a Lévy distribution, they should look similar at all levels of magnification: the shape of the distribution of price changes should be identical irrespective of whether one is studying ...”

“... and while UNAMIR, for which he was responsible, took serious casualties – was an act of criminal self-indulgence. As the casualties mounted and the Nigerian Ambassador to the UN asked in desperation if ‘Africa had fallen off the map of moral concern’, Boutros-Ghali did not even get back to attend key Security Council meetings. Moreover, UNAMIR was ...”

“... at a disadvantage compared with their better-paid Northern colleagues. The potential for self-enrichment is great. In the film, Farage claims to have worked out that you’d need to earn a formal salary of £250,000 a year to have the income you’d get if you worked all the available angles. Some MEPs have tried to return their unused ...”

“... of detecting, of following clues to find out the facts, has given rise to all sorts of clever, self-reflexive non-genre writing. Borges was an addict who wrote pastiches in which the detective works from a prison cell; he also played with the idea of reconstructing what was already there: his Pierre Menard begins rewriting Don Quixote word for word, and ...”

“... he stuck at a task which cost him so much, but also offered him so much in terms of a renewed self-respect; there is the opportunity for intimacy with the woman he always loved but never possessed, Sara Hutchinson, who acted as his amanuensis while he was writing it. All this is very well done, if a touch sentimental, a bit too insistently part of ...”

“... transport under fierce popular scrutiny. John Prescott, with his two Jaguars and his immense self-satisfaction, became an obvious target for embittered travellers, but the gross strategic error was the failure to make long-term decisions years ago, when there was ample warning on these matters. The vacuity of the Third Way could hardly be better ...”

“... And anti-semitism. Romania’s problem was not just a lack of men who were sufficiently virile and self-sacrificing: the country was being suffocated by a surfeit of Jews, with their predatory activities compounding their parasitic presence. Accounting for 800,000 out of a total population of around 19 million, Jews were particularly visible in the regions of ...”

“... heaven. No wonder it takes the patients straight out of the poem, leaving the speaker with the self-interrogation which, one senses, he has been avoiding as hard as he can. From shame, from weakness, from ‘shakiness’ – a condition referred to in one of the other poems – or perhaps from lifelong aesthetic preference, the speaker, it seems, would ...”

“... together, making them 28-line poems, and all are given titles, such as ‘True Admiration’, ‘Self-Flattery of Her Beauty’, ‘An Entreaty for Her Acceptance’ – as the latter two indicate, most of the love poems addressed to the young man are now addressed to a woman. To effect this, it was necessary only to change three masculine pronouns in the ...”

“... themselves with the world and how to get on, or with the notion that books might be used for self-advancement. Suits for favours, suits for grants, gifts which implied loyalty, gifts which implicitly sought some form of tangible reciprocation, all of these were part of the texture of life in this period, and no one could survive without mastering at ...”

“... to the primal, instinctual, animal behaviour that lurks beneath the veneer of psychological self-control and social convention’. Another quotation – from Of Men and Monsters (1997), Richard Tithecott’s book on Jeffrey Dahmer – advances the idea that ‘the serial killer . . . is the monster within, or rather he is monstrous normality within the ...”

“... draw attention to it would be to advertise a country’s dependence on external trade links, and self-sufficiency is the ideal promoted by the politicians of the region. There has long been a close relationship between the control of water resources and the exercise of political or economic power. Ancient Mesopotamian agriculture relied on networks of ...”

“... a rambling sailor waiting for her on every quay. These images, projected at random from the buried self, create the poem in their own right. They are romantic images; but death was also ‘the whole dreadful heap’ which she had witnessed often enough, and the time when she would not have to think any more, or even be.‘I mean to go through the door without ...”

“... Marxist-Leninist movement with a non-starter economic policy and, as time went on, a penchant for self-enrichment. Like Islam and Christianity in many parts of Africa, Marxism-Leninism was a malleable doctrine, susceptible to many local heresies, but the MPLA was rigorous in its discourse, and the persecution of its enemies, if nothing else. As the party of ...”