“... enforceable, the adoption of the Act without Scottish consent illustrates that mechanisms based on self-restraint and mutual trust break down, with serious implications for the stability of the UK.What’s more, the UK government challenged the Scottish Parliament’s own 2018 EU Continuity Bill (which would have enabled some differentiation for Brexit in ...”

“... mobilisation that successfully prevented disease in low-income countries: universal lockdowns, self-isolation, masking, quarantine and tracing – by people, not apps – of all those whom sick people have been in contact with. Yet in his short video message Hancock was speaking the old language of Americans and Europeans, coming up with a tech solution ...”

“... might prefer to meet Stein, partly because Stein herself played with ideas of the portrait and the self-portrait, but also because the ways she did this seem so confusing to us, with our idea of the confessional. Her style is so direct that it’s surprising how much it can hide. Biography seems to be an answer to a sense among some readers that Stein does not ...”

“... in its stride a particularly vicious hurdle, or, cut out the horse, and now I was my own awkward self who hadn’t seen the puddle, and waded straight through it, or who had seen it but hadn’t noticed how deep it was, and slammed down, first one foot, then the other, to make the water splash up over the top of my boots. For a minute or so, I became the ...”

“... of defence that the killing was the result of misadventure or accident, or that the killing was in self-defence, or that the killer was of unsound mind at the time of the killing, or that the killer was a child. The examples quoted in the books of pardons granted to child killers before formal recognition of an age of criminal responsibility are particularly ...”

“... thing but probably lies deep in my character.It is a strange performance, the clash of callow self-certainty with a certain innate modesty, resolved in a (typically Zweigian) stance of passivity and helplessness and evasion (‘probably’). Compare this to the insight into his processes provided in The World of Yesterday, his last work:So if my books are ...”

“... Eufor handed over to a UN force. Like Kouchner, the EU spoke of ‘success’, and this note of self-congratulation was echoed by Darfur activists, who had been urging an intervention in Chad. The columnist Nicholas Kristof, a prominent member of Save Darfur and one of the first to talk of genocide in 2004, wrote recently in the New York Review of ...”

“... early days of MI5 because of the latter’s relative autonomy – Andrew calls it ‘essentially self-tasking’ – which allowed its officers to follow their whims, which must have been coloured, if not determined, by their social backgrounds, and were emphatically not typical of most of the compatriots they were supposed to be serving, especially when the ...”

“... is probably a more reliably involving gambit than Here’s what happened. Some of Marías’s self-consciousness as a writer can probably be set down to his patrimony. The son of a well-known philosopher father (who also wrote a book on Cervantes), he made an early start as a novelist in what he understood to be an old tradition: in 1971, at the age of ...”

“... workers astray, rather than (as was usually the case) the same reasonable workers taking a self-interested decision to maximise their wages. It became obvious, however, that governments needed the assent of trade unions to succeed. Together with capital and government, they made up the wobbly three-legged throne on which Heath sat. Later, three legs ...”

“... fact ‘directed against our country’; Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, parroted this self-serving line in August 2007, announcing that the assassination had been organised from abroad by forces seeking to destabilise Russia (code for Boris Berezovsky). Another Byzantine theory holds that rogue elements in the FSB carried out the killing, as part ...”

“... the campaign; indeed shut its eyes and closed its ears, according to Andy Burnham. This is a self-serving argument, and untrue. No British election has ever been won or lost on immigration or crime. And Labour didn’t ignore them. On the contrary, Labour’s policies on both have been driven by and for public effect. From the moment it came to office in ...”

“... the name is a sort of protest – cutting down on his expenses and his human contacts, drifting in self-imposed quarantine. It’s a suggestive image for a man who hadn’t been able to make a go of things abroad, couldn’t then stand to be on his home island, and could only regroup in the changeable element. He sold the boat at a decent profit, went to ...”

“... case began, the fifty randomly selected jurors crowding Court 12 were trimmed to a dozen. Anyone self-employed, with children, a critical job, or working for a small employer could be excused from a case scheduled to last as long as this one. One barrister remarked – out of earshot – that few of the selected jurors had jobs. Only 15 reporters could ...”

“... Williams, the novelist Amelia Opie and the novelist and dramatist Elizabeth Inchbald. Hays was self-conscious about her looks, never allowed her portrait to be taken, and was punished for the crime of being plain in the macho chit-chat of men she had imagined were her friends. The last section of the book will be the most familiar to those who still read ...”