“... in Bergoglio, whose meekness, Vallely writes, ‘was not some natural modesty, bashfulness or self-effacement’. It was, rather, an act of will in the spirit of Jesuit self-discipline. ‘In Pope Francis humility is an intellectual stance and a religious decision. It is a virtue which his will must seek to impose on a ...”

“... figures down.) There’s a lot of suitable talk about giving people confidence, adding to their self-esteem, helping them to ‘reintegrate’, to raise their heads from the ground-staring position. Someone involved with the magazine told me that selling the paper taught the vendors how to become, she said, ‘like tele-sales people’. It’s an ...”

“... two years; the number of waged Hispanic employees fell by about 56,000 and the number of ‘self-employed’ rose by 25,000. The Public Policy Institute of California, which crunched the numbers, argued convincingly that these trends were not driven by recession. But it was legislation in 2010 that felt to Hispanics like a declaration of war. SB1070, as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is absolute. The argument between vanity architecture and random post-architectural infill, self-designed termite colonies wedged into every nook and cranny, is presented in all its naked absurdity. The great white monster stadiums, with their choked plants withering in stone beds, are a beached fleet. The Peace and Friendship Stadium (which hosted the ...”

“... conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of self-importance’. He attended the first Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin, but was repelled by its fanatical anti-Communist rhetoric, which reminded him of Nazi rallies. He was never a Cold Warrior and, although he seems to have kept MI5 informed of ...”

“... of male speech – a kind of reverse Philomela.13What I’m pointing to here is a critically self-aware ancient tradition: not one that directly challenges the basic template I’ve been outlining, but one that is determined to reveal its conflicts and paradoxes, and to raise bigger questions about the nature and purpose of speech, male or female. We ...”

“... Helm wants to put it in such stark terms. Sacrificing democracy for the sake of the planet seems self-defeating, since democracy is one of the things we need to preserve if we’re to have a sustainable future. Yet at any given moment democracy looks more like part of the problem than part of the solution. Helm’s answer is to take the long view: tighten up ...”

“... to trade directly with each other, rather than having to rely on expensive and possibly self-interested intermediaries. (A ‘natural’ is an institutional investor that wants to add a large block of shares to its portfolio or to sell a portion of it, in contrast to a professional trader who is just looking to turn a short-term profit.) Some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... display, asserting his regime’s legitimacy through allegory and pageant. The tournament was a self-consciously medieval survival, a link with the knightly past, and was at the heart of the court’s solemn and costly pleasures. Charles became a star, watched with increasing admiration by the heir to the throne, who was some six years younger than he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had in mind, is the fact that they go on stubbornly living – at the level of myth, of national self-consciousness, of imagined past and present – in the shadow of an already distant past. It is their fantasy relation to the struggle of fascism and communism that continues to give them or rob them of their identity. Germany remains the prime example, in ...”

“... 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 ...”