“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... my eyes to what can go on between two men of different ages and class and character: At that self same instant that M. de Charlus passed through the gateway whistling like a fat bumblebee, another one, a real one this time, entered the courtyard. Who knows whether it was not the one so long awaited by the orchid, that had come to bring her the rare ...”

“... working class – marked inequalities in health, education, security of employment and pay shape self-perception and the perception of others in much the same way today as they did fifty years ago – but that, as both Labour and the Conservatives converged on the profitable electoral ground represented by an expanding middle class, they effectively ...”

“... geese of the German economy. But the Greens’ deeper problem is that they have transferred their self-righteousness from the environment to the way they go about politics in general. The party of long-haired sneaker-wearing parliamentarians now wear crisp suits and ties. Its role as the government’s most hostile opponent has been taken over by Alternative ...”

“... for his popularity. A number of prominent liberal intellectuals – in a move that suggested self-flagellation but was closer to racial blindness – claimed that if Trump was popular, it was because of liberal condescension to the fabled white working class. The identity politics of the left, they suggested, was driving misunderstood and maligned ...”

“... alongside these people. One admires but doesn’t want to be the women in this book. Such lowbrow self-centred sympathetic reading habits are more common with novels. It’s not quite right to say that the women of the Harvard College Observatory were treated poorly. But while it’s true that Annie Cannon’s classification system was universally adopted, it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... image and the propaganda shot where people hold fast to staged poses; above all in the billions of self-portraits in which each photographer shows time and again how she or he wishes to be seen and known to the world.From the age of three until the age of thirteen, Cumming’s mother, Betty Elston – born in 1926 – was much photographed. Her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Confederate states under military rule, stipulating that they would not be allowed to become self-governing and rejoin the Union until they permitted black men to participate in politics on the same basis as white men. The pariah states acceded, with remarkable results. ‘You never saw a people more excited on the subject of politics than are the ...”

“... tolerate a former slave ruling over its most valuable colony. But Toussaint Louverture’s army of self-freed soldiers – men and women uprooted from their homelands and families, survivors of the Middle Passage and of an especially brutal form of slavery – wouldn’t submit to bondage again. The French general Charles Leclerc promised to subdue ...”