“... modern political analysis, the moment when someone finally pointed out that public figures are as self-interested as the rest of us. The only trouble is that all the evidence suggests Astor was telling the truth, and Rice-Davies was lying. Maybe he would, but in the end he didn’t, did he? Davenport-Hines writes: ‘One of the cruellest details of the ...”

“... did. Heroism and hero-worship enact a similar orientation towards transcendent Fact, and so does self-forgetful labour, that ‘appeal from the Seen to the Unseen’ (‘laborare est orare’), which Carlyle describes as the only way for the unheroic to gain real as distinct from hypothetical knowledge. According to his notion of the feudal loyalty that ...”

“... rebelled against the German-dominated tastes of the Petersburg Conservatory and developed a self-conscious Russian style, incorporating ‘what they heard in village songs, in Cossack and Caucasian dances, in church chants and . . . in the tolling of church bells’. The Moscow Opera grew out of this revolt; so did Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art ...”

“... about a ‘character’ who was also a type. Something was lost with the protective modesty and self-surveillance that came with the spread of a standard of politeness.Gillray’s annus mirabilis was 1782, when he produced 52 plates, most of them on political subjects. The great events he would trace in the next quarter-century include the rise and rapid ...”

“... ancient memories of persecution; both invoke a sense of solitude and existential vulnerability, a self-image that confounds (and often outrages) their far more vulnerable neighbours. When Iran was ruled by the shah, the countries were allies. But in his last years in power, he became increasingly frustrated by Israel’s expansionism and arrogance, warning of ...”

“... This is a country where convicted murderers, even multiple murderers like Barend Strydom and Robert McBride, are released within a year or two to walk the streets and give TV interviews justifying their savagery. Strydom, who gunned down 11 hapless black passers-by because he didn’t like blacks, advises us that he dislikes English-speakers just as much ...”

“... in a few days’ time. Only at that stage did it emerge that Ms Roberts was so full of naive self-belief that she really did think she would win, and wouldn’t hear a word more of this defeatist talk. She lost by 13,600. The second point is far more significant. Young notes that Mrs Thatcher has developed a close relationship with the large Jewish ...”

“... Labour paper should not succeed, as the Herald did under the inspiring editorship of Robert Blatchford and George Lansbury – provided only that the Labour movement is sufficiently enlightened to set up a newspaper trust which would guarantee its editors as much freedom as that enjoyed by the editor of the Economist, say, or the Guardian or, in ...”

“... expressed pity for the poor women on the street, but many viewed them with misogynist contempt. Robert Fabian, a former London superintendent, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also ...”

“... one day, he said, Mitterrand might get the job. Shortly before Mitterrand’s death, Robert Pesquet, a former member of the OAS – a far right terrorist organisation in Algeria – revealed that the incident was indeed staged and that he had been the fake assassin. The affair cast an unflattering light on Mitterrand’s character: he was ...”

“... diminish in professionals who work daily with people in pain; it would, not least, be a matter of self-protection. Once​ Mr Lagnari knew he had cancer, the rate at which his pain worsened accelerated. Of course his tumour was growing, as were the metastases in his liver, but it was also his perception that he’d been invaded that quickened his pain. At ...”

“... him to admire it, and Mr Coningham on his left entreating him to despise it, must end, in mere self-defence, in shaking both the critical gentlemen off, and judging for himself, not of the Bellini only, but of every other picture in the collection as well.’ There is a deliberate confusion between the assessment of the condition and authorship of a ...”

“... getting dressed next door to Nijinsky at a club swimming-pool in Bar Harbor, the set-designer Robert Edmond Jones was surprised by a knock at the door: I open it. A middle-aged man stands there, exquisitely dressed in fastidious nuances of pearl grey which harmonise with the tones of his silvery, scented moustache. He is tall and willowy and his delicate ...”

“... his sins (that is, his desire); or Run Lola Run (1998), in which Man communicates despair and self-hatred from the Berlin equivalent, while Woman does something about it, in postmodern fashion, three times over. As these examples demonstrate, phone boxes have led an exciting imaginary life, and not always in big cities. A good deal of folklore attaches to ...”

“... Treatise of Government is ‘slavery’, a fate to which Locke thought the political theory of Sir Robert Filmer condemned everyone except monarchs. Still, Machiavelli’s influence on the American revolutionaries is plain. His description in the Discourses, memorable in the way of oxymorons, of the way the tribunate made the Roman republic ‘more ...”