“... had no place in the West.The confrontation with the Soviet Union put new pressure on the West’s self-definition. To combat a state with a universalist ideology required the US, above all, to secure universalist credentials of its own. But the domestic writers most invested in the term ‘the West’ were among the fiercest critics of its own ...”

“... Fred’s mid-twenties, is the Jamesonian sentence in full bloom: sinuous, capacious and strikingly self-assured. If we are to believe Fred, he remained faithful to Sartre his whole life. When he moves on to Marxism, he doesn’t abandon the insights into style, expression and consciousness developed in his first book. Instead, he eventually integrates them ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”