“... be made up by yet another wheely from Reg’s junk stall. Miss S. never mastered the technique of self-propulsion in the wheelchair because she refused to use the inner hand wheel (‘I can’t be doing with all that silliness’). Instead, she preferred to punt herself along with two walking-sticks, looking in the process rather like a skier on the ...”

“... harm from every point of view. The lack of dignity, the utter squalor and contemptible lack of self-control are really too horrible to contemplate.’ Coward, who never came out, appears torn between compassion, blame and the vehement disgust of columnists like John Gordon, who feasted on the case. He seems to own a vague idea of tactics towards legal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Fallow thinks, that Shakespeare inherited and stuck with: ‘both father and son were successful, self-made businessmen.’ Whether​ as a budding young entrepreneur or an aspiring young actor – or quite possibly a mix of the two – Shakespeare’s move to London was a key event in his life. We have no precise date for this; it’s perhaps unnecessary to ...”

“... or a civil war as overtook Greece. De Gaulle had redeemed French honour and given a sense of self-respect back to the French people. Second, he extricated France from Algeria without a civil war on the mainland. Third, in the constitution of the Fifth Republic, he bequeathed political arrangements that had proved durable. In 2018, none of these ...”

“... Memmi had known in Tunis.For Memmi, this vision rested, again, on a denial of the concrete: the ‘self-hatred’ and ‘mutilation’ of the colonised, and their desire to reclaim and assert their identities, religious and national, rather than initiate a socialist revolution. When he revisited Fanon’s work on the tenth anniversary of his death in ...”

“... with her mother, even down to the use of a pseudonym. This was one way of inhabiting a second self.Conflict between mother and daughter lies at the heart of Good Behaviour. The story mostly takes place in the 1910s and 1920s at Temple Alice, the St Charles family seat. It is narrated in retrospect by Aroon, the ‘unloveable’ daughter who has, in ...”

“... She’s playing Town; you live there too.While writing this, I read another essay that made me self-conscious; it lamented the trend toward the autobiographical review. Oh no, I said to myself, like Lenù at university, like Lila at the party, I have been doing it wrong the whole time. I went through what I had written, carefully removing the I, I, I. Then ...”

“... that can’t be undone, a life-defining crime. We never get to know that, because these people are self-selectingly the kind of people who won’t tell us the truth. In the case of Wirecard, my hunch would be that its shady origins in porn and gaming put a kink in its corporate DNA. Some of its actions, in some jurisdictions, were never legal. The line between ...”

“... not because of any special wisdom, conviction or statesmanship, but from the universal reflex of self-preservation. Even Hitler, mad as he was, rejected the use of Nazi supplies of poison gas, because he had had a whiff of it in the First World War and understood that, if the Germans were to initiate its use, everyone, including Germany, would be enveloped ...”

“... The entrepreneurs began to flourish and the enterprises to decline. Thanks to khozrashchot, or self-financing, a stiffening dose of chaos was introduced into the hitherto regulated world of production, distribution and supply. The provision which gave the workers the right to choose the managers meant that many were elected who had little incentive to ...”