“... One​ of many remarkable aspects of Egypt’s 2011 revolt was its intense self-consciousness. It wasn’t just that the sit-ins were being broadcast 24 hours a day on satellite TV, with huge screens mounted in Tahrir Square so that the crowd could watch itself writhing in pixels, like the mosh pit in a nightclub ...”

“... crush it. The Daily Mail ethos – strident, certain, mono-minded – smacks of the bully’s self-disgust. It is not a joyous newspaper, or a happy one, and Dacre’s worst effect has been to let it seem mired in the things it hates, as if society’s worst excesses were mostly an outgrowth of its own paranoid imagination. As with most warriors for ...”

“... to kill by persuading her to commit suicide. His hatred of Christians grew, as did his disturbing self-belief. In 1940, he tried to join the resistance but was turned down. It was more radical, he said, to walk down the street ‘taking a piss with your cock out, with no shame, as I have done’ than it was to follow orders.Ion Antonescu, who took control of ...”

“... isn’t nearly as strong as PR from Brussels would have us believe.Even if liberals’ newfound self-confidence is misplaced, it might shift the parameters of realpolitik. For years, pundits and politicians have been fixated on a wave – or as Nigel Farage once put it, a ‘tsunami’ – of populism. But there was nothing inevitable about this. While ...”

“... books division of Random House. She attributed her career advances to Steinberg’s coaching in self-assertiveness, but explained that she had lost her job because of him as well. He threw out manuscripts she brought home from the office. Her black eyes and broken bones could not have helped much at work, nor could the steady diet of cocaine Joel ...”

“... even of the best art. As Philip Kerr has perceived, and embodied in his choice of extracts, a self-consciousness about truth goes with scepticism about it to produce the modern science of propaganda. Truth is the first casualty in war, whether hot or cold; when Churchill remarked that truth in wartime was ‘so precious that she should always be attended ...”

“... source; it certainly ignores, probably wilfully, the extent to which the ‘imagination’ as a self-justifying entity has been called into question by a wide range of modern literary theory. Under Briggflatts may exclude the more obviously secular poetry of its period for reasons to do with the view argued in the essay on Muir and Clarke: its omissions are ...”

“... during her bleakest periods of despair, she always seems to have been buoyed up by a mysterious, self-sustaining glee. Drunk or sober (more often the former than the latter), flush or destitute, star, salesgirl, call-girl, or, final incarnation, grande dame and monstre sacrée, she never lost a talent for living memorably. Born a ...”

“... family regime of ‘black-bloodedness’ (a term which Charles Tennyson popularised) ‘the boyish self-confidence disappeared and Alfred became subject to those moods of self-torment and remorse which are not uncommon in boys of sensitive nature.’ Happily in later life, the poet was able gradually ‘to free himself from ...”

“... of the Revolutionary legacy. What matters is political philosophy, each society’s attempt at self-reflection and self-understanding. The longest single quotation in the book comes from a speech by Royer-Collard in 1822, in which he explained that ‘the death of the old society’ opened the way to centralisation ...”

“... Feynman, might have said, Ed Fredkin is a very interesting guy. He is, among other things, a self-made millionaire without a college degree who became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he was 35. Fredkin’s father, Manuel, was so competitive with his own children that he could not accept it when his eldest son began ...”

“... such suckers? Were all their ideas, of good and bad and right and wrong, of God, of manners, of self-endeavour, of a rough and ready egalitarianism ... were all these simply a conspiratorial implant from the class above them? And if so, what are we to make of the Scottish radicals, including Marxists, who sprang almost entirely from this ...”

“... sniffed the air; each, gingerly, made resolutions.’ The penetrating particularity with which self-recognition in Helen and Edward is traced goes some way towards redeeming what would otherwise be a dispiriting tale. Our lives are not what they might have been, but they are not worthless either. We are asked to respect the integrity that might lie behind ...”

“... and beautiful observations have the effect of creating and bringing the reader back to herself, a self all the more quietly egocentric for being as inaccessible today as that of her brother, as much a part of a style and a period. It is impossible to imagine the actuality of William and Dorothy, their being and conversing together, but the scenes that must ...”

“... and they did suggest the liberating drama of a poet feeling her way towards an original style of self-expression. In this new collection, however, McGuckian’s sensibility seems to have become trapped within the idiom. Many of the poems feel syntactically inert, but are forced to stagger forward under an impossible weight of proliferating metaphors. At her ...”