“... Haiti had few friends. Virtually all the world’s powers sided with France against the self-proclaimed Black Republic, which declared itself a haven not only for runaway slaves but also for indigenous people from the rest of the Americas (the true natives of Haiti had succumbed to infectious disease and Spanish slavery well before the arrival of ...”

“... it wasn’t the Queen of the Fairies that had beguiled her. It was something lodged in her own self, a wet, dark, sweetbitter, slightly greeny, timeless wraith, which longed to exist in its own right, to have its own, independent life, to swim or fly or just walk free, dark and perverse enough to glamour the world for ever with its eerie light. I ...”

“... to the parallel cult of ‘pristine’ wilderness. Devotees of both practise a highly selective, self-induced blindness, cancelling from their view, and all claims to their sympathy, everything that intrudes on their preconceived pictures of how landscape ought to be. This sort of mental bulldozing tends to bring real bulldozing in its wake, in fits of ...”

“... for Britain’, which was seen as a transparent leadership pitch. She responded with a self-denying ordinance pledging she would never again as home secretary stray beyond her brief. She stuck to it during the EU referendum, limiting herself to a few half-hearted remarks about the security implications, where the case for Remain was always going to ...”

“... obscenity, a literary grenade hurled at several targets at once: French collaborationism, Jewish self-hatred, Israeli loathing of diaspora Jews and, above all, the polite, repressive aura around the word ‘Jew’, daubed into the prose like graffiti. Published the year before Portnoy’s Complaint, Modiano’s novel has something of Roth’s exuberant ...”

“... seems just another repetition, this time in the language of voluntary codes of practice, of the self-refuting assertion that the forest is infinite and ...”

“... Estudiantil. In August 1963 a DRE member had an angry encounter in New Orleans with Oswald, a self-appointed champion of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. What emerges from this tangled history is the scale of the Agency’s efforts to destroy Castro and his government. What doesn’t emerge, but which Morley darkly suspects, is that Oswald was somehow ...”

“... told him. Fanon, alert to the transformation that had caused Sartre to replace the abstract ‘self’ and ‘other’ of Being and Nothingness (1943) with a new understanding of power relations in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), based in part on the distinction between coloniser and colonised, gave lectures on the Critique to Algerian soldiers in ...”

“... family members had little or no access.Correspondence was subject to military censorship, but self-censorship was even more effective in concealing the realities of war. The appelés were keen to reassure their parents of their safety, or to flirt with their girlfriends. Writing letters was a means of escape. Michel Berthelémy wrote to his family every ...”

“... that planners should know which kind they’re getting into. The first, ‘in it to win it’, is self-explanatory: the proxy is used to defeat an enemy’s forces. The second, ‘holding action’, involves the idea that the aim of an intervention by proxy may be to prolong a civil war in order to to maintain the status quo. The third type, perhaps the most ...”

“... an odd deduction to make from Ophelia’s report of the unbraced doublet and untied stockings of a self-neglecting, melancholy lover. ‘Is he pressing her against his exposed crotch?’ Bailey inquires.Bailey has published valuable books on fashion and masculinity and on debt in Renaissance England. Why this swing into presentism? The answer lies only partly ...”

“... anything Colette had ever done with Willy at her shoulder; she had an ‘uncompromising zeal for self-exploitation’, as Angela Carter once said). Could it be that Colette was actually censored from Aberdeen District Libraries in the 1970s? We should have been doing her for French O Grade. We could have learned so much it would have been so good to ...”

“... can be mutual,’ in general animals have to be trained into having sex with humans. Even self-identified zoophiles often ‘groom’ animals: bribing them with food, constructing specialised barns, halter breaking, acclimatising them to human penetration with dildos, injecting them with hormones. Such conditioning, Bolliger and Goetschel write, not ...”

“... by Black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement, found nothing in Wheatley’s poetry but ‘self-hatred’ and a refusal to engage with the ‘liberation of the Black man’. Amiri Baraka said Wheatley’s ‘pleasant imitations of 18th-century English poetry are … ludicrous departures from the huge Black voices that splintered southern nights with ...”

“... shocked to learn his ‘commodity value’, but what is referred to as his ‘speechless self’ moves towards destruction. Drunk, he kills a stockbroker on his yacht and is sentenced to death. During his trial he receives letters from old clients, men for whom he remained fixed ‘as a planet among the moons of their longing’. The soupy-spiritual ...”