“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a provision granting Montenegro the right to call a referendum on independence, premised on a ‘self-determination’ clause that had been drafted into the Yugoslav constitution of 1990, itself never ratified. The EU succeeded only in requiring that Đukanović delay the poll by three years – he would wait four – and raise the threshold to 55 per cent ...”

“... of a shipbuilding race were utterly engaged. This mass of metal had become the symbol of national self-respect. To leave her unfinished would have been as unthinkable as, shall we say, to scuttle half the fleet.’This year, national self-respect didn’t seem to be at stake in Port Glasgow, though residents who knew the ...”

“... a riot by these same agricultural workers the year after he published Rural Rides. Cobbett saw how self-inflated governments could sit by and watch lives crumble. His discriminating rage has the tang of today. ‘The system of managing the affairs of the nation,’ he wrote in Cottage Economy, ‘has made all flashy and false, and has put all things out of ...”

“... Sasha, a biker from Odesa, was tired, defiant and knowing, full of terse and slightly self-conscious veteran’s talk, though he only joined up on the day after the invasion. He took part in the operation to clear the Russians from Posad-Pokrovske in March and has been there ever since. ‘Stupid people dig shallow trenches’ is one of his ...”

“... up lightly, still less to make a profession of. Some film stars have been said to lack a stable self of their own, to live only in the public appearance of a bundle of different roles. Given Plato’s conceit of the actors as so many extensions of the poet, for him it is the dramatist who is like that. Not a person who will contribute to the austerely ...”