“... 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 ...”

“... into danger is to assert that asylum seekers in general are lying. As a political strategy this is self-defeating, because, to be effective, it relies on the impossibility of satisfying the public’s appetite for crackdowns: the more the government tells people that the great majority of those seeking asylum do not need it, the more asylum seekers it will be ...”

“... apparently felt they had more urgent problems to address. The only printed response came from a self-styled ‘artist and big game-shot’, who claimed that his experiences of stalking deer in Scotland had shown him the importance of ‘breaking up the outline’ rather than just trying to make uniforms tone in with the background. This fellow vouched that ...”

“... describes the plague with remarkable scientific detachment, though not without great pathos, his self-observed recovery and subsequent immunity from this unique world-historical disease perhaps setting him off on that journey adrift from his locality, a stranger among his own people, wandering untouchable, a ghost, watching without participating any longer ...”

“... federalism was established. The EPRDF system stressed autonomy, regional government and self-determination, and lasted for almost three decades. Its executive committee was composed of 36 members, with equal representation from the four parties, though the TPLF held the balance of power. The impetus for the federal system came principally from ...”

“... to mount a highly effective vaccination programme throughout the strip. Israel acted from self-interest: the ultra-orthodox Haredi community are opposed to vaccination, leaving 175,000 of their children vulnerable to a virus that spreads swiftly and silently.Rarely has the space for humanitarian action been as constricted as it was in Gaza when the ...”

“... of Avignon’.The defence tried to insist on closed hearings, but their arguments were ultimately self-defeating. The videos of Gisèle Pelicot’s abuse were, they said, too ‘nauseating’, too ‘indecent and shocking’ for public view; they would disturb the need for ‘serenity and dignity’ in the court. Her willingness to allow the videos to be seen ...”

“... the last people I wished to see – Somehow that the Downs should be seen by cultivated eyes, self-conscious eyes, spoils them to me.’ Her countryside was not to be taken over by these philistine middlebrows. Modernism was on the march, and the enemy was the Squirearchy.Woolf called Squire ‘more repulsive than words can express, and malignant into the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was thought likely to get a first but didn’t; he was understandably a little mortified but his self-reproach can’t have been helped when he received a note from McFarlane saying, ‘Here are your marks and pretty miserable they are, too.’ Others of his year with less resilience than Adam received similar notes and I find this hard to understand, let ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nuclear holocaust, or some other diversion. Besides, I had a sentimental yearning for the days of self-improvement: they were founded, these reading clubs, by master drapers and their shop-girl wives; by poetasting engineers, and uxorious physicians with long winter evenings to pass. Who keeps them going these days? I was leading at the time an itinerant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... like a cave, but a place of artifice, of skill. Across five thousand years you can still feel the self-assurance. The walls are of red sandstone, dressed into long rectangles, with a tall sentry-like buttress in each corner to support the corbelled roof. The passage to the outside world is at the base of one wall. Set waist-high into the other three are ...”