“... that historians have consistently underestimated the ‘centrality of Western eyes’ in Soviet self-understanding or, to put it differently, the degree to which Soviet leaders worried about how their actions would look in the West. This could reach ludicrous proportions: when the 1937 census came in millions short of the projected population ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... account of his brush with death, I feel shaken again: as if my fairly innocent adolescent self is sitting on some huge prehistoric monster stranded on the rocks with a pale blue sky behind it. But that’s not quite right; the wrecked ship isn’t just something used and past: it’s like looking at the disasters, mistakes and accidents that are all ...”

“... Camilla’s first husband. Sophie was clearly put out that something so suitable for her own foxy self should be thought appropriate for Granny Frump, and went unprofessionally silent for a while. It used to be that the British public looked on these occasions with a subject’s sense of inclusion, seeing very clearly their own role and their own station in ...”

“... hands of the champions of repeal, by making them sound principled, and their opponents whiny and self-interested (this is what Norquist was playing on in his Holocaust rant). Similarly, it didn’t help trying to explain that ‘double taxation’ was nothing to get excited about, since it was so commonplace (the same individuals can be taxed on ...”

“... creates, in Hanta, his subtlest ‘idiot’. Hanta may also represent the closest Hrabal came to a self-portrait. (Hrabal, like Hanta, rescued books from the compacting machine, and built a library of them in the garage of his country cottage outside Prague.) Hanta’s wide reading allows Hrabal to use all the mental resources of his hero, however ...”

“... unrelenting aggression has driven weaker team-mates out of the game entirely, undermined their self-belief to the extent that their simplest skills, ingrained since childhood, deserted them. (Something of the kind happened to me.) He has ruined opposing clubs, defeating the Cleveland Cavaliers, for instance, so often and in such heart-breaking fashion that ...”

“... mythic biography.’ Its mythic qualities make this story, which in many ways defines English self-understanding, more than English. There are recurrent, prefabricated mythic patterns in the Robin Hood corpus, set pieces such as the episode of shooting an arrow into another man’s arrow, which Knight calls both archetypal and phallic. But he fails to ...”

“... was always a Gandhian notion. It was an acceptance of the carefully constructed and self-serving imperial model of two dominant religious communities in permanent conflict. This was a travesty of Indian history, but served a variety of political needs and soon became acceptable to every side and was the justification for Partition. Nehru ...”

“... of its time, is the language used in fiction by Arthur Koestler or Victor Serge to express the self-abasement of old Bolshevik victims of the Great Purges. The Prophet Armed describes Trotsky’s rise and apogee, from his birth in a Jewish farming family near Odessa to the summit of his power and influence at the end of the Civil War in 1920. From his ...”

“... isolated. Haffenden reminds the reader that Empson believed the true writer has to sustain ‘the self-centred emotional life imposed by the detached intelligence’, but ‘the price of the detached intelligence is painful isolation.’ Still, in one way or another he had a good life, enjoying the fun but capable of intense and rewarding work; not immodest ...”

“... to most historians conclusive evidence of the Marian regime’s shortsightedness and instinct for self-destruction. Yet the case can be made that in 16th-century terms the burnings were inevitable, and that they were efficiently carried out and persuasively defended. The regime had to break the back of Protestant resistance, and pressed the device of painful ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”