“... as he has lost the courage of his convictions. It’s clear that he never had the political self-confidence to impose his authority on the neo-Blairites who surround him. Nonetheless, Labour’s problems aren’t all the doing of the leadership. Equally responsible are the external circumstances that are in the process of reshaping the British political ...”

“... after going back to full-time drinking in the wake of his wife’s death in 1954.) But Marlowe is self-conscious about his narratorial duties from the start. He keeps close watch on his similes: ‘I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it,’ he says in The Big Sleep after likening a woman’s voice to ‘bells in a doll’s house’. On occasion ...”

“... love,’ as the motto of the Russian muzhik, a real man, goes. Immigration is a splitting of the self. But it’s also a premature schism in the most important union. If Shteyngart’s memoir is a love story between him and his parents – and it is – this is where the marriage hits the rocks. The young lovers grow apart. They want other things. They ...”

“... mass of biographies can make Dickens’s life seem as inevitable as a fairy tale, his genius so self-evident that a novelist’s career was certain. But the alternative lives he might have led, as a debtor like his father, or as a clerk or a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that ...”

“... underwent a dramatic change of character, sounding more like the populist Sun than its former self, as it ventured deep into come-off-it-mate territory. Headlines promised revelations about ‘Tory Country Gents’, ‘Toffs’ and ‘Grandees’. In the Telegraph of old, such people were meant to be its readers; now the paper used Google Earth to zoom in ...”

“... paranoiac [Fliess] fails,’ he wrote to Sándor Ferenczi in 1910. It is on Freud’s eminently self-serving interpretation of his relationship with Fliess that Ernest Jones and Ernst Kris, editor of the censored version of Freud’s letters to Fliess, relied when, at the beginning of the 1950s, they constructed the myth of Freud’s ...”

“... any sugar plantations in the Caribbean, cotton mills in Manchester, parlour-maids, benefactors or self-martyring subservient spouses: times have changed. Writing – particularly the writing of novels – requires the twin privileges of time and money, and if you haven’t got them you are almost certainly doomed to failure, ground down by the exigencies of ...”

“... and tailored’ strike (a characteristic Obama phrase) which would also exact a painful toll? This self-contradictory presentation was partly owing to another of the forces urging American ‘punishment’, namely the advocates of humanitarian war, and chief among them the president’s national security adviser, Susan Rice. Her stance differs very little from ...”

“... prohibition of recourse to international force (Article 2(4)) by states except in circumstances of self-defence, which itself was restricted to responses to a prior ‘armed attack’ (Article 51), and only then until the Security Council had the chance to review the claim. The ban on wars of aggression, and the strict control even of wars of ...”

“... unmistakable) changes of expression. Simon says Marlo represents ‘that strange combination of self-love and self-loathing that rarely dares speak its name openly’. This makes sense, and Simon should know. But it isn’t quite what we see. What we see is a man who is wary but confident; elegant; not cruel, merely (from ...”

“... of it is extremely funny, most of the time on purpose, as it plots its antihero’s cynical and self-serving efforts to tackle climate change over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at ...”

“... Fairness stands at some remove from social utility, and more remote still are concerns about the self-respect of the individual. These incommensurables complicate the discussion of responsibility, though not, of course, among practising politicians. Furthermore, Brown notes that philosophers distinguish carefully between ‘brute luck’ (over which nobody ...”

“... founded, in 1951, on just such an ‘as if’, with critics writing as if films – not just self-evidently artistic statements, but also seemingly disposable Hollywood genre movies – could be taken as seriously as classical tragedy. And by doing so, these critics proved it was so. They wrote as if Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray et al ...”

“... written late at night, but in the morning she found her angry emotions had vanished. Her waking self was devoted to the image that their marriage was strong. Natasha at three in the morning was an entirely different person from Natasha at breakfast. She asked herself: are the late night entries the faithful ones, or those I write during the day? From the ...”

“... obeys a compulsion that will not relent. In the lines of his face are buried layer on layer of self-distrust and disappointment. He had a late start in movies – his first noticeable role came at the age of 34 – but he entered with the air of a veteran because he had grown up a close observer of the men who ran things. His father, Timothy, was a ...”