“... I may have had drained away as the ever ebullient, jokey, matey, vindictive Morgan described a self-contained world of vacant celebrity and tawdry sensationalism that I have never quite believed anyone took seriously. But it becomes clear that Morgan took it very seriously indeed and so do the people whose lives were his raison d’être as an editor and ...”

“... for it. When all parties begin to see conflict as inevitable, then the ‘inevitable’ becomes self-fulfilling. Americans are fond of comparing the situation in the region to the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism; but perhaps Europe in 1914 is a better metaphor: the situation is such that some small, unexpected autonomous event might trigger a sequence ...”

“... had employed ‘pride and ego down’, military argot for a technique intended to cause a loss of self-respect in the detainee; in this case, to bring a high-ranking officer ‘down a peg or two’, as Welshofer put it. In front of several hundred Iraqi detainees, Welshofer testified, he had forced Mowhoush to his knees and slapped him. Mowhoush had then ...”

“... thugs and killers maintain order throughout the nation. Of course they are protected by people’s self-censorship, by the killing of journalists (historically, in this respect, Colombia ranks highest or second highest in the world), and the endless confusion of rumour such an anxious society produces, with the encouragement of the media and the government. It ...”

“... posters describing themselves as Concerned Muslims Living in Tower Hamlets. There was little moral self-examination. Hizb ut-Tahrir forbade its members to take out insurance policies (betting on an act of God was unlawful), but many insured their cars under a family member’s name. The party encouraged Muslim women to cover themselves completely, but allowed ...”

“... was somehow seduced by the regime. Tooze shows that Speer continued right to the end to produce self-serving statistics and to coerce concentration camp victims to maintain production, even when it was clear to all reasonable people that the war was lost. And Speer was not alone: there was no simple division between technocrats and ideologues in the Nazi ...”

“... for example, bona fide beauty queens racing naked for a prize Ferrari. Escobar was of course more self-indulgent than the average DEA agent, and certainly had more fun than any one hundred of them, but he spent very much more than a Ferrari’s worth building public housing for Medellín’s poor, and was even more Napoleonic in his business affairs. It was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... regularly assumed in the text. For all the continuity one might choose to see between his jocular, self-referring methods and those in favour with Postmodernists, it’s likely that this late novel, read from scratch, would be found as pointlessly out of kilter as were Les Gommes or Dans le labyrinthe in their day, which would prove that for all the efforts ...”

“... example, whether animals believe things (apparently they don’t), to whether the concept of the self is irreducible (apparently it is), to how many people it takes to think about a light bulb (apparently it takes two; see below). A lot of the fun of reading these papers is seeing how an exiguous collection of commitments plays out in so many different ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”