“... This man has a discerning eye for the details of attractive female presentation: he can see her self through her clothes, not just her body and income. Catherine, in turn, inwardly admires the set of Henry’s hat and the capes of his greatcoat. The sexual appeal of dress was not an appropriate topic for public conversation between men and women, but in ...”

“... was always a whacked-out right wing to make bellicose liberals look moderate.) In the self-congratulatory atmosphere that enveloped American public discourse after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kennan’s doctrine became the key to what in retrospect seemed inevitable. One problem with this account is that it leaves out Kennan himself. Almost ...”

“... other than with the Almighty, played a secondary role. The nub of this doctrine is ‘To thine own self be true,’ where integrity – saying what one conscientiously thinks, or at least not saying what one doesn’t think – is central, just as it is in John Rawls’s theory of justice of 1971. The claim that access to speech matters doesn’t flatly ...”

“... Territorial and maritime boundaries are usually porous. The frontiers of virtually all self-proclaimed nations have fluctuated considerably over the centuries, while claims to a single, all- embracing nationhood are often contested from within, and/or sporadically overwhelmed or denied from without. In some countries, at some point, politicians and ...”

“... to his drunken youth and subsequent soul-saving entry into the evangelical fold, and taking self-deprecating potshots at his tricky time as part-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. The message was that these episodes were tests of the candidate’s resolve, temporary setbacks in the higher drama of his journey to the Texas governor’s ...”

“... on, we find that Section 2340A might need to be violated anyway in conditions of ‘necessity or self-defence’: all of this to argue against the possibility of criminal liability on the part of US interrogators. Guantanamo protocols begin with polite questioning – ‘the detainee should be provided a chair and the environment should be generally ...”

“... The heroes of Albert Camus’s books can be quite annoying: surly, self-dramatising Hamlets who like to think of themselves as strong, silent loners, wise to human folly. But although they are often arrogant, self-absorbed and predictable, they are also susceptible to the weather, and happy to be upstaged by unseasonable storms, torpid nights, fierce sunlight, or the chance of a swim in the limpid sea ...”

“... strict Reichians, pornography fostered masturbation, which locked the individual in a self-reinforcing loop of diminishing returns.) Tynan experiences an epiphany at a live show in Hamburg, where he, wife Kathleen and another couple spend a lovely evening watching a young ‘mutually affectionate’ couple copulate on stage. For some obscure ...”

“... reading a biography so utterly abstemious in critique and evaluation, so wary of the minor self-aggrandisements that accompany the biographer’s possession of and by his or her subject. Most biographies amount to a celebration of the triumph of mind over matter. This one opens not beside the cradle, or at the distant root of some genealogical ...”

“... It is your birthright.’ To me, Elvis was a delirium; to Bruce, he was a destiny. Bruce was a self-proclaimed Greaser whom rock’s renegade energy flushed out into the open and legitimised on the American scene. Greasers, he writes, ‘were the kids destined to live the decent hardworking lives of their parents … the future farmers, homemakers and baby ...”

“... surprise, she enjoyed the exercise. ‘The Midtown … made me looser,’ she said. Singing was self-defining: it allowed Simone increasingly to speak from her black experience, not from the white milieu of classical music. ‘I didn’t know I could improvise like that,’ she said. ‘All the time I was practising. I’d practise Bach and Beethoven and ...”

“... money stock was the one and only thermostat that policymakers required to regulate an effectively self-correcting economy; second, that rules should be introduced, via what Friedman called ‘constitutional provision’, to insulate monetary governance from the temptation to meddle with an economy that was better left to its own devices. If everyone expected ...”

“... the PLO which would insist on the national rights of the Palestinian people as well as Palestinian self-determination. Vance said that the US would immediately recognise the PLO and inaugurate negotiations between it and Israel. Arafat categorically turned the offer down, as he did similar offers. Then the Gulf War occurred, and because of the disastrous ...”

“... by his obscene and irrational father, Abraham, could be taken as an analogy for the state of self-imposed tutelage Kant wanted society to escape. Prudently, the Prussian royal censor banned him from writing about religion again.Kant wasn’t the first to find the story troubling. Commentators looked for ambiguity in God’s command – did he really mean ...”

“... Tell me​ your mystic and I will tell you who you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author ...”