“... a blueprint for a new constitutional balance between Britain and the wider empire. It proposed self-government for the Bay via a local assembly like that of Jamaica, which would be responsible for regulating trade with Britain and collecting duties for the Crown, in exchange for a guarantee that the British army would enforce their rights when ...”

“... silver thread.’ We must not forget either that Jacob is himself a merchant, though a lazy and self-indulgent specimen: ‘Jacob never sits in the office, but rather at a little table having tea, dressed lavishly, like a Turk, in a blue-green Turkish caftan and a dark-red Turkish cap. Before they get down to business, they always have to have two or three ...”

“... along the shore at Margate, subjected to the white noise of puns, submerged quotations, barks of self-intoxicated laughter, is to understand the manifold potentialities of the word ‘front’. North Sea, First War, BNP, con, flash. Seabrook is a very mouthy writer, his rude tongue perpetually thrust into someone else’s cheek. He pronounces: Eliot sat ...”

“... Milosevic or Saddam do? They were sitting ducks. The attentats of 11 September have altered this self-assurance. Here indeed was an unforgettable spectacle, designed to mesmerise the West. The target of the attacks was the US, not Europe. If the European states, Britain and France in the lead, joined in the counter-attack on Afghanistan, for their ...”

“... from which sufficient ore could be extracted to make the operation profitable. Miners were usually self-employed and working in groups on a claim; technological limitations meant that seams could rapidly become worked out if they were not substantial enough. The mining history of the period consequently revolves round a sequence of discoveries and their ...”

“... shape. Why were immigrants, or the sons and daughters of immigrants, so invisible in France’s self-representation? He thought the answer could be found in Fanon. ‘The gaze of the other,’ he said. ‘It’s all still there.’ A colonial question after all, then. Most of the youth rioting at the end of 2005 were not alive at the time of the Beur March ...”

“... had made the local economy deeply dependent. As a result, when the border was closed in 1993, self-sustainment was no longer possible – the means weren’t there. Decades of expropriation and deinstitutionalisation had long ago robbed Palestine of its potential for development, ensuring that no viable economic (and hence political) structure could ...”

“... and, bizarrely, the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, which takes inspiration from self-proclaimed Christian prophets. Nafie had assured the Ethiopian intelligence chief that the summit would pass without incident. It’s still not clear whether he was lying, or had been kept in the dark. At any rate, Gebre Medhin had his revenge twice ...”

“... of the run; hence the anguish that followed it). He cuts a curious figure on the field, compact, self-contained, quintessentially Australian in his weather-beaten baggy green cap, but also fidgety and uncertain, his close-set, small, deliberately blinking eyes striving to give off an air of preternatural calm while also hinting at a vacancy and a sense of ...”

“... freeing slaves in the Revolutionary War and providing ‘a meaningful degree of local law and self-government’ in Sierra Leone, Americans were building a new republic that protected Southern slavery and marginalised free blacks in the Northern states. Did Britain do a much better job than America of advancing black freedom between 1770 and 1800? British ...”

“... transmit it directly. That’s the theory anyway. Of course formalist art can seem very glassy and self-absorbed, alienating – as so many people find Greenaway’s films. His 1988 TV film Death in the Seine, for instance, sounds fascinating: a series of tableaux showing bodies pulled from the Seine in the years 1795-1801, with descriptions and personal ...”

“... then at least as ‘decent ethnocides’. And if your definition of a just war extends beyond self-defence to include armed intervention in outlaw states, as it does for Rawls, then opportunities for genocides of this type increase exponentially. It would, for example, be possible to put up a robust defence of the genocide of native peoples in the New ...”

“... Shaw is particularly sharp about Brittain’s treatment of Harry Pearson, a good-looking, self-pitying wastrel who drifted in and out of Holtby’s life, engaging and annoying her in equal measure. Holtby had known him since they were teenagers in Yorkshire; he had written her some youthful love poems but the relationship never developed much beyond ...”

“... his fellow men and women – of a piece with, say, Douglas’s or Alun Lewis’s inward-turning to self – Swingler was a unique voice, but not a solitary one. In such armed forces, how could he be? He, too, was of his time. Others turned outwards in other ways – perhaps most famous until now, Roy Fuller; certainly Henderson with his elegiac sense of ‘our ...”

“... Macmillan, Wilson and Heath years involved the slow surrender of military power and technological self-confidence, so even Zuckerman’s successes looked a bit like failures. They still do, but for different reasons. He warned forty years ago that humans were beginning to put their own planet at risk. Has anything changed, even now, when most people recognise ...”