“... Albanians were poorer than Macedonians, that was clear, but they were also more committed to self-enrichment. Forced abroad by their poverty, they earned hard currency in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Britain and the US, and sent home remittances. And in due course they returned to drive better cars and build bigger homes. They were selling the pass by ...”

“... party, but, in his incarnation in Bow Bazaar, and as a crucial element in Mookerjee’s self-definition, he is also of the colonised’s history without his, or probably Kipling’s, knowing it. This thread of ambiguity runs through much of modern Indian culture: many of the great writers in Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and the South Indian languages were ...”

“... its obvious difficulties. No one can object to the attack on confusion, conflict, obscurity, and self-deceit in our everyday beliefs; these defects in our views of ourselves and the world exist in profusion, and if some philosophers can with skill or luck do something about reducing them, those philosophers deserve our respect and support. But it would be ...”

“... f + s + i → T, where A is access, m is money, r is resentment, b is blackmailability (sic), s is self-satisfaction, i is ideology, and T is Treason. Ha, thought I’d forgotten f? No, it’s just that f is the pièce de résistance: it stands, would you believe it, for flawed character. It is with some relief that one turns to Anthony Glees’s Secrets of ...”

“... an obscure seaman. The East India Company gave him a chance to satisfy his zeal for intellectual self-improvement as well as his social ambitions. He would boast that he had never watched a horse race or fixed a gun in his life. As Governor of Java (briefly captured from the Dutch), at Bencoolen, the EIC’s malarial and unprofitable base in ...”

“... dart upon me and sting me, Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all. Nothing of this self-doubting despondency about his poetic creations is to be found in the millions of words Traubel credits to Whitman in his final years. Rather, he is intent by then only on monumentalising himself, as the conversations turn, time and again, to his ...”

“... postwar government had the conviction or courage to make real such a moment, and Akihito’s self-defined role as protector of the constitution made it impossible, by definition, for him to step outside it unaccompanied. It is one of Japan’s greatest failures in 75 years of postwar success that it remains unreconciled with the countries in the world ...”

“... of restricted data as a jumble of accidents, ideologies, political expediencies, bureaucratic self-interest and unintended consequences. He’s not against the idea of state secrets. He just thinks that the history of American attempts to keep nuclear secrets is what you get when politicians think badly about what scientific knowledge is, about the ...”

“... the morbid pathology of William Lyttle, the scratching and scraping Mole Man of Hackney.† This self-funding tunneller was condemned, without planning permission and private equity, to eviction, seizure of property, theoretical bills, and a despairing death. On her way to Tregunter Road in Chelsea, Knowles discovers that professional excavators prefer to ...”

“... could get some young blood who doesn’t know how things were managed, or that the Pennines were self-policing in them days. When we do arrange a get-together we don’t go to the Rat Trappers but to a place in Saddleworth where nobody knows us. We are down one these days; even at seven, Vin had fags in his pocket and his brother used to punch him for ...”

“... should pay more tax than the poor. However, in most means-tested welfare states there are brutal, self-sabotagingly high tax rates for people who are on benefits and trying to move off them into paid work. In the UK and Germany, for instance, the marginal tax rate – the amount of tax paid on a specific band of income – for people coming off ...”

“... the point of abjection, merely reinforced the problem it was meant to resolve: a crippling lack of self-esteem. Some bitter quarrels ensued. None lasted long enough to destroy their absolute conviction that love for each other had been the great event of both their lives. Ackland died of cancer on 9 November 1969. Warner survived for a further eight years. The ...”

“... in music as Flaubert does in the history of the novel, the moment at which the form becomes self-conscious, measures its new distance from the relative innocence of its tradition and announces to its audience: ‘Catch up if you can.’ If we don’t get it, it’s our fault. Hoffmann happily insulted the general audience: ‘Beethoven’s mighty genius ...”

“... daily functions, giving them a secret life. Skateboarding is unresearchable: anecdotal, singular, self-expressive. And that’s the problem with The Answer Is Never, Jocko Weyland’s history of skateboarding (which began as an article in Thrasher),* as well as the recent skateboarding documentary Dog Town and Z-Boys. Both try to do it all. I found myself ...”

“... The ‘golden era’ was quickly tarnished; old habits died hard; hard men refused to die; self-reliance, the Eritrean watchword, mutated into a grotesque form. The brief opening for reconstruction and civility was lost. Argument, bitterness, reprisals, the bristling retreat to the moral high ground, the absolutism of the mountains, where everything ...”