“... a village (women from Sierra Leone, a Yemeni in a wheelchair, many more Syrians and Iraqis), a few self-appointed scouts walked up and down the border looking for a safe path. To the right of the police was a river that couldn’t be crossed and to the left there were hills which, it was said, were patrolled by bandits who were demanding €200 from anyone ...”

“... first diagnosis of the disease in the United States. A traveller from Liberia, asymptomatic (by self-report) on boarding a flight from Monrovia to the United States on 19 September (as our team left Zwedru for Monrovia), fell ill in Dallas a few days later. His symptoms were similar to those described in every Ebola case: a fever of ...”

“... the good man par excellence. So why didn’t Gustave study medicine? Was it because this path to self-realisation was already occupied by the dour Achille? Or was it, as Sartre claimed in The Family Idiot, because Flaubert Senior thought the boy unworthy? Winock doesn’t tackle the question. In any event, it was decided that the second son must accept a ...”

“... as a ‘special area of human hope’. For many refugees, it evidently still is; but the EU’s self-appointed role in the vanguard of the fight for universal values has become doubtful, to say the least. There are others who might secretly be hoping for Brexit. The financial industry on the Continent calculates that it might get London’s ...”

“... on offer at the movement’s headquarters in Raiwind outside Lahore. The Tablighis emphasise self-improvement by living according to strict rules that extend to which foot to use first when entering a lavatory (the left – and the right when leaving). In the UK, Tablighis are advised to keep non-Muslims at arm’s length and are warned about the dangers ...”

“... on the Americans to ‘transcend themselves’ and decide what was more important: ‘misguided self-esteem’ or getting rid of the ‘greatest threat’ – Islamic State. Lavrov is well practised in low-key sneering. Speculating on US motives he suggested that ‘it is probably not very nice [for them] to see how effective[ly] our military is working ...”

“... appear as passing phases in a painful but necessary process of coming to terms with Russia’s new self – post-Communist but also, for the first time in five hundred years, no longer imperial. Though the collapse of the USSR was experienced by many Russians as a diminution, accompanied by an abrupt demotion in the ranking of global powers, Trenin still ...”

“... have found the troops in the 1930s, if there had been no calming prospect of advance towards self-government and eventually independence? Yet intelligent men like O’Dwyer and less intelligent men like Dyer never stopped believing that Britain could hold India down by force ad infinitum. And Nick Lloyd appears to think so still. Kim Wagner’s view is ...”

“... viciousness – official reports, state television announcements, the grammar of the regime’s self-image – alongside the worlds of those one step removed from the street battles playing out in the city. Such skirmishes are always left on the edge of the page, recently ended or just out of focus; of the action itself, we see nothing. Inhabitants of the ...”

“... but the New York Times wasn’t among them; Time, Newsweek and the television networks ignored it. Self-censorship was pervasive. The Washington Post was an exception: the Post’s editors rewrote it, adding Pentagon denials, and put it on the front page. The question for Hersh was: how to expand the investigation beyond Calley? An answer came when he spotted ...”

“... playing was an extension. He would also have to unpick the idiosyncracies of his largely self-taught technique. For Khan (known as ‘Baba’, an honorific melding ‘guru’ and ‘father’), music was next to godliness, and he could lash out when students frustrated him; one boy was hospitalised after being struck with a tuning hammer. He prayed ...”

“... most famous examples were written in German and Italian. Marx’s Grundrisse, seven notebooks of self-clarifications developing his ideas and earlier work, was posthumously published in Moscow in 1939 and 1941. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written in an Italian fascist prison between 1929 and 1935, contain essays on the state, civil society, the role of ...”

“... grapevines and citrus trees could be moved from Europe to New South Wales, making the colony self-sufficient or even a source of supply for Britain; seeds from Peruvian cinchona trees could be grown in British India to ensure a steady supply of quinine, with which to fight malaria. Banks thought up one of the earliest British plots to steal tea ...”

“... control and can’t explain. I know many people for whom watching sport is collective, ritualised, self-transcending. They go to watch the same team in the same seats with the same friends, week after week and year after year. My sport watching isn’t like that. It isn’t primarily social. It’s more like reading: private, solitary, concentrated. Now that ...”

“... redoing his signature image (one understands why Tree Man came to be thought of from early on as a self-portrait), take steps to scramble any face-to-face reciprocity. We’re lost in the maze of waterways, the tide’s coming in, and Tree Man’s not offering to be our guide. Maybe the deer on the shore has caught his eye. But he seems, as much as ...”