“... how these things happen. The Truce was written 14 years after If This is a Man: it is a more ‘self-conscious’ book, more methodical, more literary, the language much more profoundly elaborated. It tells the truth, but a filtered truth. It was preceded by countless verbal versions: I mean, I had recounted each adventure many times, to people at widely ...”

“... adopt a consistent policy, which would be difficult, or could drop its global rhetoric and windy self-righteousness, which should be easier. So all the propositions on which the Netanyahu polemic is based are false, and there is no case for an Israeli-led Western crusade against ‘terrorism’, with Mr Shamir, perhaps, as its commander-in-chief. The US is ...”

“... first time, and Barthes’s solemnity here looks more and more like a deadpan act, or a feat of self-discipline, or perhaps both: Buster Keaton at the semiologists’ circus. There are two new collections of essays by Barthes, first published in French in 1982 and 1984, and both now translated; and there is Susan Sontag’s anthology, which first saw life ...”

“... all others responsible for the privatising – or privateering – operations, should submit to a self-denying ordinance, like Parliament in the Civil War. There ought to have been the fullest guarantees that none of them or their families or hangers-on would benefit personally. No such assurances have been forthcoming. There has always been room in the City ...”

“... took to jolt us out of the state of internal paralysis and overpowering depression. That kind of self-deafening is a psychobiological defence mechanism against insanity. But all it takes is one flash of light in the darkness for those who have passively and apathetically sunk into collapse, waiting only to hit bottom, to rise again. With their fall into ...”

“... The first is a realistic if undemocratic fear, since changing them is our right; the second is a self-aggrandising fantasy in which attempts to alter the status quo are seen as madness, hysteria, mob rule. They often assume that we can’t handle the data in a crisis, and so prefer to withhold crucial information, as the Pennsylvania government did in 1979 ...”

“... that rests squarely on justice itself, but in general the project of justice is not given to self-limitation. There’s no reason to think that markets will prove a more enduring way of organising production than, say, feudalism. At present, though, in the face of the market’s dominance, theorising about justice seems a bit like trying to do origami in ...”

“... in the gift shop of Jerusalem’s Garden Tomb, a site originally sponsored by that opinionated and self-destructive Victorian Evangelical, General Gordon. The pastor was trying to encourage them to buy models of Herod’s Temple; ‘After all, we all want the Temple rebuilt, don’t we?’ he coaxed. ‘Oh yes!’ came the enthusiastic chorus. You might say ...”

“... loans while retaining much of their risk smacked of ‘regulatory capital arbitrage’: self-interested exploitation of the detail of the Basel rules. Concern about regulatory arbitrage helped drive the search for a follow-up to Basel I. After prolonged negotiations, the Basel II agreement started to take effect in the mid-2000s. (Basel agreements ...”

“... he admits a long list of personal failings, including, at the very lowest point in his life, when self-loathing touched everything like a spreading stain, ‘the fact that … I couldn’t stand the sight of Celts, English, Politicians, Strangers, Virginians, Negroes (light or dark), Hunting People, or retail clerks, and middlemen in general, all writers ...”

“... emissary, Stafford Cripps, promised the Congress Party leadership that India would be granted self-government and dominion status after the war if it would continue to help the Allies win it. His mission failed – Gandhi called the offer a ‘postdated cheque drawn on a crashing bank’ – but Orwell did his best to soften the truth. In his broadcast ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an orthodoxy makes for a purer belief, rather than its demolition. The heretic normally believes self-consciously that he has some new access to the secrets of the universal essence – as revealed in a Da Vinci code, for example, or in significant recent happenings, or both. In this case, the people being fostered by prophecy are a ...”

“... and, using prefaces for foreign translations and for new editions, embarked on the process of self-criticism which Clarke and others have seen as a retraction, the equivalent to a confession of the failure of his grand enterprise. It is only fair to Althusser to point out that the suggestion that the Party hierarchy brought pressure to bear on him is not ...”

“... find ... It is worth ... You will be able to get a fortune for it ...’ It was clear that her self-control was weakening and that she was on the point of physical collapse. ‘Tonight,’ she burst out finally, ‘you must come tonight!’ No sooner had she left the room than the old criminal’s body was convulsed by a fit of coughing: he spat blood into ...”