“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Wilde’s second son – that kindled his interest. One of his first truly Cravanesque pieces, self-published in 1913, is a strange séance-like ‘interview’ with the long-dead Wilde, whom he also calls Sebastian after Wilde’s Parisian alias, Sebastian Melmoth. The piece veers between adulation and insult; Cravan is seduced by the possibility that he ...”

“... failed to use the period of extraordinary growth to create the basis for long-term, and more self-sustaining, development. Both Germany and Japan, after suffering military defeat, economic ruin and enemy occupation, became major economic powers within a long generation. A closer comparison is offered by strongly nationalist South Korea, which took ...”

“... to them. The families of the dead boys were represented by Maurizio Ribeiro, a very young, very self-important lawyer, never on time. He was suspicious of me because I asked about the evidence against Franco. He assumed I was on Franco’s side and was wary of my meeting the dead boy’s parents. Finally he agreed, but the meeting had to take place in the ...”

“... by the Lawrences (the document was duly processed in the incident room) and whether Gary Dobson, self-confessed ‘nigger-hater’, really did borrow a Bob Marley CD from the Acourts (not whether this provided him with an alibi on the night of the murder), rather than the sufficiency of evidence in the case. It is the lack of a sense of proportion ...”