“... who spoke German. He had studied medicine in Germany after escaping from the East; she was a self-consciously romantic woman who spoke a hyperbolic, soulful, Russian-accented version of my mother tongue. During the summers there were also my uncles and aunts, who came to visit our cottage in Virginia; there were my mother’s buddies from Istanbul, and ...”

“... these men follow their base instincts, when they find themselves incapable of exercising any more self-restraint than the dog who tried to mount her when she was six. Talking about her abusive ex-partner, she is similarly fatalistic:Steve Silver is in the racing hall of fame, but when he drank he’d beat me. I was with him seven years. He wouldn’t let me ...”

“... home in this anti-apartheid warren and his word ‘ingenuity’ seems to honour the busy African self-reinvention he could still see in the workshops: ingenuity was about making good from making do, trying to keep the show on the road. In one image a young boy in short trousers, short sleeves and tie is poised on tiptoe tuning an antique three-string double ...”

“... must have belonged to adults who suffered from ‘malnutrition’, a mind-boggling level of self-deception. (Krznaric is better known as a pop philosopher, but his doctoral dissertation was based on a revealing set of interviews with Guatemala’s power-brokers, people who generally never speak.) Many in Guatemala would still like to believe that human ...”

“... deals or infrastructure contracts.Kuper thinks Labour’s success at fund-raising reflects ‘a self-reinforcing symbiosis between the political positions that the donors want, what Starmer instinctively wants, and what seems to make electoral sense’. The party’s record haul of donations doesn’t include the millions that have flowed into Labour ...”

“... the classical study of kinship systems had foundered on the rocks of the discipline’s endemic self-critique. Godelier’s The Metamorphoses of Kinship (2004) brought the subject back to the fore with an energy rarely found in contemporary anthropological writing. The book ranged widely, examining the long history of the field; the way that kinship had ...”

“... which banned all works of instruction in the magical arts. But this turned out to be another self-defeating measure that did more to excite interest in the prohibited books than anything else.According to Davies, a shift in the official view of magic was precipitated by the investigation in 1678 into a plot to poison Louis XIV. As the recently created ...”

“... been drawn to film for similar reasons: in Cooper’s phrasing, ‘the safety of repetition’, ‘self-protection’, a way of enjoying one’s ‘separateness’ and an opportunity for ‘inner identification’, as well as an occasion for pleasure and a source of education. Until Brian becomes a BFI regular, we are told in the opening paragraph, his ...”

“... original confession. He now claims that he never intended to murder either man. He only acted in self-defence – Pereira fired at him first.Pelado’s family had moved to Brazil’s north-west corner during the dictatorship, and he grew up in the Javari Valley. He was four when a pair of Petrobrás oil surveyors were clubbed to death by Korubo warriors; in ...”

“... does anything show quite so clearly the price it had to pay for its own machinations, cover-up and self-deception. The army lied. And once its prestige and standing had been compromised by the first lie – the wrongful accusation of Dreyfus – it became even more important for it to lie over and over again. Crushed by defeat in the war with Prussia and the ...”

“... with the smallest historical railways-related facticle verges, perhaps deliberately, on self-parody. (On the history of dining cars: ‘A straw in the wind was the abandonment of croutons with the soup course, after the Pullman company was finally absorbed into the nationalised system in 1962.’) But Bradley is able to set his enthusiasm aside to ...”

“... accusation and urgent statement, and a set of eloquent meditations on suffering and redemption and self-realisation. It is a love letter and a howl from the depths. Its tone is hushed and wounded. It is written with passion, intensity and some wonderfully structured sentences. It is lofty, haughty, proud, and also humble, soft-toned, penitent. It was written ...”

“... thought, both their voices rose in pitch like children’s voices. At moments of greatest sexual self-consciousness they would find themselves using baby talk: ‘You want to play?’ she said. He said, ‘Sometimes, I still think of you having sex with that man the day before we got married.’ ‘Do you?’ ‘I wonder why I still do, and why it gets me ...”

“... can’t be achieved by staying with him when she wanted to. ‘If any man had proved sufficiently self-centred and commonplace to attempt my subjugation,’ she writes about the fear of abandoning herself to love, a fear that comes up again and again, ‘I would have judged him, found him wanting, and left him.’ Perhaps Beauvoir’s independence was ...”

“... bureaucrats still speak of the virtue of the echt British practice of ‘muddling through’. Self-denying master of Europe, Germany knows that Brexit is a wake-up call of some kind, but it still takes what Hegel described as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of ...”