“... and Skoot’ out loud, and then falling asleep again until the nightguard of my conscious self woke me up for another interrogation: Do you remember? Yes, it’s Moot and Skoot. Eventually, I scribbled it down.How can something that feels so right, so true, in one dimension, amount to such nonsense in the other dimension? Whatever dreams offer ...”

“... power in this zone have increasingly shifted from the bailiff towards broadcasting – no self-respecting clan is now without its radio or TV station. But the substance remains much the same. In the late Sixties, this was a Namieresque landscape of families like the Rosado connection in Rio Grande do Norte, so numerous that its patriarch ran out of ...”

“... the cheery, dark-haired and charming ten or 11-year-old girl with her hand almost on her hip and a self-satisfied sort of look on her face? There are images throughout the book of bodies in shadows and of faces blocked. Photographs are torn or cut up. There are Christian schoolmates in class portraits whose fate is beyond the scope of this book. Only one of ...”

“... attitudes to Estonia, McCartan concludes realistically: ‘I am not so sure, therefore, that self-determination for Ireland would raise much enthusiasm in official circles. Anything they are likely to do for Ireland will be done in the hope of breaking up the British Empire and thus further [sic] the world revolution.’ If only people like Bernard Shaw ...”

“... and grinned. ‘What would have been the reason?’ ‘Come on. You could have done it, easy. Self-defence. No court on earth would have sent you down.’ ‘True. It occurred to me.’ ‘Then what happened? Did you – did you just feel too weak all of a sudden? Did you just feel too weak?’ ‘On the contrary. When I had their heads in my hands I ...”

“... of growth, in turn, was sustained by new arrangements between states, whose ‘pursuit of narrow self-interest’ led both to trade liberalisation and the first limited measures of integration in the Schuman Plan. It is on the way these developed into the European Economic Community that Milward’s subsequent work has focused, with a mass of empirical ...”

“... full of history, but it’s a work of polemic, zanily contradictory, alternating between extreme self-righteousness and hysterical paranoia. Putin steers a zig-zag course through Ukraine’s complex history, which is, indeed, one of ever changing borders and evolving identity, but claims throughout that the Ukrainians and Russians are one people. This ...”

“... a job, even, with a proper bed and a three-day weekend every second week: arrangements making for self-respect and mutual consideration. She took up a position, vigilant, just outside the door of her room. At the sound of feet coming up, she planned to retreat and draw the bolt. She listened for anything she could pick out, above or below the music’s ...”

“... of exchange value. The commodity’s value is generated from its shifting place in a complex, self-contained world of money equivalents. So that finally the usefulness of petroleum presents itself as merely the outward and accidental aspect of something more basic: the article’s price. For all the talk lately about the emergence of a post-industrial ...”

“... and his violence, is animated by motivations more profound than power for its own sake, or self-interest. ‘His father had a mission, thought that he had a mission to save his people,’ the Russian journalist Andrei Babitski explains to me in his Prague apartment, next to a bottle of wine and a television set permanently tuned to the Chechnya Today ...”

“... industry can be obsessed with itself in the middle of somebody else’s war sometimes borders on self-parody,’ he harrumphs: here are these ‘big swinging dick’ foreign corrs, living it up in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn; here’s Mick, stuck in London without even a Pret sandwich on expenses. Imagine you were him and you landed Deichmann’s ...”

“... heartwarming. Helmut Thiemann, a communist Kapo who survived seven years in Buchenwald, wrote in a self-justificatory report to the party after the war that he had co-operated with the SS in selecting prisoners from the infirmary for murder in order to to keep his job there: ‘Because our comrades were worth more than all the others, we had to go along with ...”

“... in Nature, ‘an original relation to the universe’. The times may have become ripe for turning self-control into a form of evangelism, sensing that our wish to be the planet’s saviours is also a bid for immortality. We discern a new mastery to be enjoyed over the life of everyday stuff and we consider ourselves responsible for stewardship of the ...”

“... industry it spawned in Poland, colour our view.But more than that we need to know how complex, self-referential and fundamentally hard to read photographs are. Pictures of Jews taken by German soldiers playing at anthropology in the Warsaw Ghetto, Struk shows, make reference to the elegiac images of poor Jews taken by the Jewish photographer Roman Vishniac ...”

“... part of policing: the military-style parades and rote learning – of laws, street names, holds, self-defence techniques – at the Met’s training college in Hendon formed a ‘spirit of selflessness and teamwork … that bound us closely as a class … and underlined the strong sense that we were part of something much bigger and more important than ...”