“... prejudice that the Burmese were, yes, nice people, talented in their own way, but unfit for self-rule, a people not quite ready for the responsibilities of government and needing direction and an iron hand. The Burmese must learn to do things for themselves, the general often said. There were other, perhaps higher motives for his actions. In the early ...”

“... that his closest family ties seem barely to impinge on him, it is difficult to take seriously his self-proclaimed anguish, his dark mutterings about a ‘deathwish’ and the attractions of suicide. What Jerry calls his ‘inner dramatics’ seem more like inner histrionics. None of this would matter too much were Kelman not being praised as a first-rank ...”

“... is used – whether the issue is the environment, food safety, terrorism or war – because it is self-contradictory: it can always be used to argue both that we should be more careful and that we should not be too careful. Blair captured this double standard perfectly in his Sedgefield speech. ‘This is not a time to err on the side of caution,’ he ...”

“... Sallust, Livy and Plutarch; to Appian and Cassius Dio on the civil war; to Tacitus and the self-serving Josephus, sensibly changing sides in the course of the Jewish revolt in Palestine in 67-69 and surviving to write its history; and to Ammianus Marcellinus, an amiable pagan from Antioch, who was writing at the end of what Gibbon called the ‘long ...”

“... when Kgalema Motlanthe too was released he gave him a union sinecure. He even provided Gwala, a self-described Stalinist and one of the most frightening men I’ve ever met, with a car and money. (Gwala, who would quite happily kill not only opponents but anyone on his own side who got in the way, had a paralysed arm but would gesture fiercely with his one ...”

“... banks,’ was the tag line for Arthur Penn’s 1967 film, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Self-importantly influenced by the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut was originally slated to direct it, but decided to make Fahrenheit 451 instead), the film portrayed the star-crossed criminals as free spirits thwarted and eventually brought down by the law. If you’d ...”

“... line for making doors and a Quranic school. Unlike many militias, Radaa is not driven chiefly by self-enrichment: Kara’s Salafism – a non-jihadist variety – is relatively apolitical, pious and conservative, and Radaa is respected since it represents a semblance of order. A commander at the base said they would disband if a real state emerged, but ...”

“... than the admissibility of evidence, are quite prepared to trick employees into self-incrimination or to misrepresent the true position in order to get a confession. But even though I never deliberately deceive or misrepresent, there is still a considerable gap between my powers as an interviewer and the protections afforded an ...”

“... act with righteous violence, sometimes not. Often they are stymied by the peevishness and self-interest of police bureaucracy. They live in the real world, the fallen world: the attractions of crime are far more potent than they are. But how often does that version of police work play in the heads of actual policemen? In most popular culture, the ...”

“... untinged with shame’, and hoped that matching funds would ‘wipe out a slur on our national self-esteem’. Given his fantasy that ‘the Jew stands on the verge of world domination,’ Chesterton could never have stayed in his job after ‘Archie was outmanoeuvred,’ as Beauman puts it, and control passed to the American Shakespeare Memorial ...”

“... whose peculiarities, appearance and inner conflicts fill many pages. There is Apothecary Krikor, a self-taught pedant who lugs his enormous library to the hilltop. There is the sardonic schoolteacher Oskanian, Sato the mad nature-girl, Bedros Altouni the patient village doctor and ancient Nunik, ‘chieftainess of magic healers and conjuring ...”

“... Britain’s future outside the EU. Other than​ his boozing sprees, little about Banks fits his self-description as a man of the people. A rich man with rich friends, he goes to the places rich people go. Nothing in his book suggests he has any strong prejudice against immigrants or an ingrained political hostility towards immigration: his wife, Ekaterina ...”

“... metaphor – from Arthur Miller’s skewering of McCarthyism in The Crucible to Trump’s self-righteous tweets. Devotees of Wicca also call themselves witches. In fiction and legend, witches can be white or black, good or bad: they can be heroines and healers or hexing hags. What strange classification can bracket such diversity, from nursery tales ...”

“... on Kashmir in 2010. Not everyone appreciates her outspokenness – she’s been called a rampant self-publicist, among other things – but her politics and her activism are all unapologetically on show in the pages of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Like The God of Small Things, the novel is concerned with family, class and caste, but it’s also ...”

“... representative in whom her people see their better selves ideally reflected’. That better self had to be reflected in the queen’s family. If the marriage went ahead, ‘the princess will be entering into a union which vast numbers of her sister’s people, all sincerely anxious for her lifelong happiness, cannot in conscience regard as a ...”