“... Levertov found something chilling about her command on the page, an ugliness in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems … She wrote some great things – saw ...”

“... under floorboards or digging them into the earth, of concealing the colour of your hair (self-Aryanisation by peroxide), of burying your feelings lest they betray you.Donald’s best friend, Roy Redgrave, discovered that his father kept a loaded .45 service revolver hidden under his bedside table. Roy knew his father as ‘a happy-go-lucky man’, so ...”

“... of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse. Nationalists speak of a historical racism that has merely migrated from government to civil society with the end of colonial rule, while civil society activists speak of an ...”

“... all considerations of mercy and humanity must bow before the inexorable demands of self-preservation.’ Civilised warfare obtained except when it didn’t. Whether what actually happened in the Valley or in other places was, by some abstract standard, merciless, pitiless and uncivilised seems a moot point. Contemporaries certainly thought that ...”

“... needs touching’ in the first 18 pages, and that the rest, ‘though I do not find it quite as self-evident as the beginning, holds together perfectly’. But then he said that ‘the political and social analyses are rather on the long side.’ He admitted his own chronic inability to understand … a phrase like ‘the Irish people’, or to imagine ...”

“... society deepened after the 1967 war; it became explicit government policy under Sadat, the self-styled ‘believer president’ who supported radical Islamists in his battles with the left, and who made the sharia ‘the principal source’ of law in 1980 – a year before his assassination by an Islamist. Under Mubarak, praying has become as popular ...”

“... freely expressed in transactions rather than restrictive social circumstances; and describe self-sustaining equilibria of supply and demand when capitalist economies are striking for their growth and instability. Piketty wants to recover the scope of political economy without forfeiting the quantitative rigour of contemporary economics. He has hitched ...”

“... Here is the Conservative chancellor, George Osborne: We choose aspiration. This budget backs the self-employed, the small business owner and the homebuyer. We choose families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants ...”

“... sanctions, in which vulnerable people have their benefits withheld as a form of punishment – a self-defeating policy whose cruelty is hard to overstate. We thus arrive at the topic that more than any other sums up the decade since the crash: inequality. For students of the subject there is something a little crude about referring to inequality as if it ...”

“... in punk had been far more important than the music: they allowed people to live out a fantasy self; they turned the streets of Britain into a semiotic warzone.This bias towards the visual arts – fashion, film, the album cover as a mass-distributed canvas – runs through McLaren’s career. According to Vermorel, he had no real interest in music until ...”

“... its own story. They came just as he was trying to revive his political career by returning from a self-imposed exile in the UK to start a new political party in Pakistan. And it worked: he cancelled his plans. In the weeks before her assassination, Bhutto had every reason to believe she would be killed. The failed attempt in Karachi made it clear that the ...”

“... have free entry for up to three months, with indefinite leave to stay if they have a job or are self-employed. But Brits would be subject to equivalent barriers on trying to enter the EU; around a million are resident in other EU countries, above all Spain, where they can collect their UK pensions through the local post office and enjoy free ...”

“... were modelled on their Latin predecessors (some English grammars were even, one might think self-defeatingly, written in Latin). William Lily’s Latin grammar, taught by royal decree in every English school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural ...”

“... and advised many of the PPP participants. Originally, the government thought the scheme would be self-financing: now it is putting in £1 billion of public money a year. Meanwhile, Metronet and Tube Lines are making a combined profit of £2 million a week. Beneath it all lie the language and rules of the contracts themselves, which Wolmar does a courageous ...”

“... of the city’s ancient reputation, the love-brothers’ rivalry over Princess Emily looks like a self-conscious heterosexual triangulising of a notoriously homosexual relationship, as happened most spectacularly with the story of Troilus (lusted after and nearly raped by Achilles in the ancient version) and Cressida. Among Theban men, Cicero blabbed to ...”