“... aims as a people, and therefore of an effective strategy for ending the occupation and achieving self-determination. This is a long-standing weakness, as Edward Said often argued in these pages. It dates back to the Mandate era, when the Palestinians, unlike many other Arab national movements of the same period, failed to build up the centralised ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the young queen. They are full of serious historical research and wild, passionate moments of self-abandon. There are marvellous scenes in the first book, most of the fun provided by the virile Bothwell:Bothwell came to the queen’s apartment and he stood on the threshold of the room, smiling at her as he had smiled in the Exchequer House.She cried out ...”

“... opportunities that came at the end of the 1920s with the First Five-Year Plan. The ‘new-minted, self-confident, optimistic and passionately patriotic’ Soviet intelligentsia of the 1930s, Slezkine concludes, showed ‘no anti-Jewish hostility and generally very few manifestations of ethnic ranking or labelling’. The Great Purges of the late 1930s were a ...”

“... fastest-growing . . . social class on earth’. In the neoliberal model they are ‘the heroic self-employed’, operating in a paradise of deregulation where initiative and entrepreneurialism will eventually triumph to the benefit of all. In practice, the growth of the informal sector has not even brought about the satisfaction of rudimentary needs ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The incident tests her love of her subject: ‘Could he have been so demoralised as to lose self-restraint and invite the schoolgirls to touch his swollen genitals?’ The received view is that he was innocent, but although Maddox disagrees she is mysteriously willing to give him the benefit of the doubt: ‘On the other hand, if Jones had simply been ...”

“... the Communist contender, whose predecessor Robert Hue fared disastrously in 2002. Buffet is the self-styled candidate of the ‘popular anti-liberal left’: a left-of-socialist coalition that failed to come together at the end of last year, enabling the Communists to appropriate the title, which always looked more serviceable than the project. Buffet and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that are essentially authoritarian, and discussion leads to division. The insufferable self-righteousness and pedantry of guerrilla leaders is not just a common character trait, it is functional: the leadership has always to be right. The Farc’s negotiating style has all the charm of the small print in an insurance policy, but it is similarly ...”

“... the belief (common among Israel’s right wing) that Arabs know only headman politics: a matter of self-seeking leaderships manipulating inchoate masses innately prone to ‘respect power’. In this view, changing a leadership would change mass behaviour and, in the present instance, put an end to violent responses to Israeli occupation. That an Arab ...”

“... 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 ...”