“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”