“... issue was one of mistaken identity, of the gap which opened up as he dug the trench, between his self, that of a free man, a man with rights, and its distorted reflection in the demeanour of the island officials. For them he was merely another black man in a trench. Symbolically, he refused to be tied to the young slave, Cézar, but he remained tied to him ...”

“... De Vries and van der Woude draw an important conclusion: ‘Modern economic growth … is not self-sustained, exponential and unbounded and – not to mince words – the [Dutch] Republic’s pioneering experience between the 16th and 18th centuries, including its experience with stagnation, may end up being a fair model for the process begun in most ...”

“... is nevertheless true knowledge about people in our society, the suicides and those who meditate self-destruction. They have grown through their lives to conform to the meanings and the stereotypes that the knowledge teaches. Genius has put on an amazing number of masks since the word was used with such effect in antiquity. The term – I hardly dare to call ...”

“... an odd deduction to make from Ophelia’s report of the unbraced doublet and untied stockings of a self-neglecting, melancholy lover. ‘Is he pressing her against his exposed crotch?’ Bailey inquires.Bailey has published valuable books on fashion and masculinity and on debt in Renaissance England. Why this swing into presentism? The answer lies only partly ...”

“... shocked to learn his ‘commodity value’, but what is referred to as his ‘speechless self’ moves towards destruction. Drunk, he kills a stockbroker on his yacht and is sentenced to death. During his trial he receives letters from old clients, men for whom he remained fixed ‘as a planet among the moons of their longing’. The soupy-spiritual ...”

“... rules’, which dominated financial commentary in the build-up to the budget. The aim of such self-imposed rules is to satisfy the bond markets that governments have set sensible limits to their borrowing plans, and are behaving rationally and predictably (as opposed to ‘politically’) in their spending decisions. The bond markets don’t like politics ...”

“... of equilibrated impulses, achieved poise, is cumulative: we are talking not about discrete, self-sufficient Paterian moments, but about provision for the future, in the form of what he later called ‘feedforward’. Certainly his own experience confirmed the doctrine: directions changed, horizons widened, Richards would ‘cross the tracks’ into ...”

“... people – the vast majority of humankind at any moment – who can’t be talked into voluntary self-denial on account of their race. The potentially useful suggestion that ‘more black people here would be a good thing’ will not be heard where the grammar says ‘there are too many white people.’ Giddy with their deserved triumph in 2018, the ...”

“... told him. Fanon, alert to the transformation that had caused Sartre to replace the abstract ‘self’ and ‘other’ of Being and Nothingness (1943) with a new understanding of power relations in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), based in part on the distinction between coloniser and colonised, gave lectures on the Critique to Algerian soldiers in ...”

“... 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 ...”