“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Talent’, published in the Egoist in 1919. ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ There’s no direct evidence that Parry read the essay – even if he was later said by one of his students to have relished Eliot’s poetry – but four years later he was arguing that formulaic diction ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Killing an abuser – though the writers took care to make Whitney’s stabbing of Leo an act of self-defence – is a legitimate response to sexual crime. Such a proposition may once have seemed outrageous, but it’s an argument now being made by the campaigners challenging the courts to overturn the convictions of women imprisoned for killing their ...”

“... promised features involve subtracting ordinary humans from the social equation. Robot maids and self-flying taxis won’t organise a union, and hologram faculty won’t give children any revolutionary ideas. The brave new world of labour discipline is already here, and management consultants’ cost-cutting measures and new techniques for the evasion of ...”

“... bearings:It was impossible to illuminate the atom by darkening it in such a manner. A wave of self-pity had begun to well up inside him when a gust of wind parted the fog, revealing the path down to the village. He jumped up and ran, but the fog returned as quickly as it had dispersed. I know where the trail is, he told himself, I just need to get a ...”