“... 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 ...”

“... Bunyan uses a corpse as a similar symbol: The body ariseth, as to the nature of it, the self-same nature; but as to the manner of it; how far transcendent is it! There is a poor, dry, wrinkled kernel cast into the ground, and there it lieth, and swelleth, breaketh, and, one would think, perisheth; but behold, it receiveth life, it chitteth, it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is that of individuals.’ Seeking to represent them as types of individual was therefore self-defeating: the best you got was a crude caricature of social diversity on the one hand, and politically isolated individuals on the other. The only apparent alternatives, however, were equally unpalatable. To represent France as 25 or 26 million separate ...”

“... and Williams both trace with regret the arc of movements that started off calling for freedom and self-determination but ended up running neocolonial or authoritarian regimes. Williams’s portrayal of Lumumba and Nkrumah is hagiographic at times, but she also offers an alternative story of national liberation, told from the perspective of ...”

“... could be put into the hands of athletes and their unions. This might well be an improvement on the self-selecting membership of the IOC, but I’m not convinced that these organisations are good representatives of the sporting world or that they have adequate forms of democratic accountability themselves. In any case, the IOC is not going to reform itself out ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not something she needs to think about. One taste of high-grade heroin clouds her mind with self-delight. ‘I’m all primary process,’ she says. ‘I live the examined life. Not one funny little thing gets by me.’Marge is fine with Converse’s plan. He knows a Marine called Ray Hicks, a Zen martial arts enthusiast who will soon be heading home on ...”

“... because they’re nervous and partly because they don’t really know much: he has always been self-contained and now works with a very small group of trusted advisers. Retired officers who have raised issues with him say he can be irascible; politicians who have interacted with him say that he tends to see things in black and white and likes to make rapid ...”