“... as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’ as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for military manufacturing’. Qassab and his associate Khalid Ousta worked with Halit Unalkaya, an employee of a Turkish firm called Zirve Export, who ...”

“... don’t cry,’ the director said patronisingly. Then, with a look of infinite self-satisfaction – the occasional arbitrary granting of bureaucratic favours being even more fun than the usual surly refusal – he picked up the phone and laconically instructed someone to ‘give her some more.’ They never did give me (or any of the ...”

“... to verse. How good is it? Is it genuine Shakespeare, or an efficient pastiche of Hamlet-style self-interrogation? And if the latter, is it pastiche by the co-worker Fletcher or by one of the later adapters? Reading Double Falsehood – or rather, trying to read Cardenio – you become giddy with options, doubts, voices that fade in and out like bad radio ...”

“... British governments on atrocities in Peru as well as the Congo: He is a man without any trace of self-interest, without any political or professional ambition. He was extraordinarily generous. He had a set of values that were both very strict and based on solidarity. At the same time, there is the man who appears in the diaries, the mysterious Roger ...”

“... that includes ‘many social currents’: among the issues it champions are the Kurds’ right of self-determination, the emancipation of women and opposition to Nato and the IMF. Many of the SDP’s founders were members of Kurtuluş, a group active on the left before the 1980 coup and prominently mentioned on the recent banners in Taksim Square. Like most ...”

“... who had ‘missed his vocation’. This wasn’t a judgment easy to square with Churchill’s own self-assessment that he ‘adopted quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe’, leaving reason and evidence to mop up whatever was left over. If sycophancy was one of Lindemann’s skills, another was summary. He knew how to condense ...”

“... be better to choose a strong Russian, he said. It should have been obvious that the advice was self-serving as well as risky for the Party’s standing in Kazakhstan. Yet Gorbachev agreed. He didn’t even pick a local Russian from the Kazakh Central Committee: he sent an official from Moscow. Putting a Russian in the top position was a throwback to ...”

“... not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of ...”

“... of the later 19th century furiously denounced Marx’s ideas, or more accurately, those of his self-proclaimed followers, as an expression of the Jewish heritage he himself had ignored. It was Marx’s ‘passionately irreconcilable, uncompromising and intransigent nature’ that had ‘the deepest and most resonant appeal, and has generated the sharpest ...”

“... highway improvements, completed by American firms earlier this year, provide a pretext for self-congratulation. Embassy handouts do not mention the regular attacks by bandits and insurgents that force most officials to travel by plane between the cities. Conditions, according to embassy spokesmen, are always ‘improving’. Victory in last month’s ...”

“... Sometimes the cult worked better than one would expect. Like many survivalists it wanted to be self-contained. It made its own guns and, I think, its own bullet-proof vests. We have a report here of a young man who was told to learn how to work as a magazine printer and book-binder. So he worked for a few months in a print shop, and learned his trade. Then ...”

“... Disney didn’t understand the emotional and pragmatic realities beyond his own wounded sense of self: ‘In this one episode, his instincts faltered: when artists expected to see the fellow artist, he showed them his business side, and when businessmen expected to work with the businessman, he gave them the emotional artist.’ Once Disney lost his ...”

“... been a dominant feature of both the Sharif and Bhutto governments? Benazir Bhutto was already in self-exile in Dubai; the Sharif brothers had been arrested. Before they could be charged, however, Washington organised an offer of asylum from Saudi Arabia, a state whose ruling family has institutionalised the theft of public funds. Musharraf’s unstinting ...”

“... Dawkins’s The God Delusion. I feel in the mood for an encounter with some bracing plain-spoken self-evidently true atheism. I suppose I can be accused of a form of superstition, in that my wish to avoid reading something superstitious has led me superstitiously to crave something with no taint of superstition, however faint! Amusing. My session is this ...”

“... the magazine, nor did he acknowledge that with this leak Moreau’s group was acting with as much self-interest, and as little regard for the consequences, as Moreau had accused the CIA of doing. The officer explained that it was understood by all that the scandal would unravel in public very quickly, and Congress would get involved. ‘Our goals were to ...”