“... producers and translators. ‘I feel I’m getting more and more entangled in professionalism and self-exploitation,’ he wrote in 1958 to Barney Rosset, his New York publisher, ‘and that it would be really better to stop altogether than to go on with that.’ In some ways, success had a calming effect on Beckett, whose experiences during the Occupation ...”

“... interested in himself? Not, I think, so very much. He had a more than healthy ego and enough self-knowledge to admit it, but all his curiosity was turned outward – towards problems, politics, literatures, languages, landscapes. Never without a book, whether bound for a tutorial or the local A&E, for decades he disappeared off for tramping holidays or ...”

“... cycle through easily available pleasures, feeling a combination of frustration, anger and self-disgust, aware that something is missing but unsure exactly what it is.’The utter desolation of this cycling was seen again recently, when West – the man who righteously derailed a charity telethon after Hurricane Katrina with his outburst about how ...”

“... of the UN unfold in practice: commitment to the rule of international law and the right of self-determination; also to the right of large numbers of people – above all, to the UN’s way of thinking, people in Africa – to place marked and folded papers in sealed boxes. The UN announced the creation of a mission to the territory (Minurso) and began ...”

“... agony; and Sonny, the 653rd Maharajah of Badanpur, who assumes that The Mulberry Elephant, a vast self-justificatory volume privately published in India, will somehow sweep the field. If the lining isn’t the point of this garment, then how does it drape, how is it cut and shaped? Lost for Words is a curious production, both off-the-peg and strangely ...”

“... described as ‘more hawkish’ than most Democrats, and indeed, like other ambitious women in the self-parodically masculine world of Washington, she may well have concluded that bellicose posturing is the only way a woman can prove her mettle in the contest for commander-in-chief. Certainly as secretary of state, Clinton allied herself with women who ...”

“... Stoker himself would have learned of the bizarre practice of which Count Dracula’s sanguinary self-medication is a grand guignol variant – the systematic consumption of human tissue for therapeutic purposes. ‘The old physicians,’ Van Helsing’s colleague Dr Seward tells us darkly, ‘took account of things which their followers do not accept, and ...”

“... modernity, had the easily underestimated Lada. Was making cars once an indicator of national self-sufficiency? Is it still? Rover, Morris, Austin, Triumph, Vauxhall, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Mini, Land Rover: when we hear the names of these firms, we think of the cars they made, and of cars driven by parents or grandparents, sisters or old ...”

“... presences. In Edward, on the other hand, the Major repeatedly sees traces of a mildness and self-mockery ‘that did not go at all with his leonine features’. When a party of Oxford undergraduates drops by to goad this ‘perfectly splendid old Tory’ (‘I mean, have you even read Rousseau’s Le Contrat social?’), the reader is manipulated into ...”

“... unproblematic also makes one wonder how much these strikes contribute to America’s collective self-defence. Elaborating on these doubts, Mazzetti adds that ‘American missions were often based on shards of intelligence from unreliable sources,’ especially ‘unreliable foreign intelligence services’ who routinely approach their American counterparts ...”

“... Each has a different experience of colonialism, a different narrative of independence, a different self-image; accordingly, the epidemic has been viewed differently, tackled differently. Her well-organised book is practical, concrete and full of hard information, but it lacks nothing in subtlety; she is conscious of the ambivalence and complexity that hedge ...”

“... the issue of the paranormal is vulnerable, both to accusations of crankiness and to a sort of self-disgust about the sensationalism involved; and it is hard to sift out an acceptable truth, given the human tendency to confabulate, the fallibility of memory, the wide scope for interpretation, and the prejudice which invests the whole subject. As a good ...”

“... to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.In these seemingly sober, useful, self-deprecating sentences lurks the MacGuffin, to borrow Alfred Hitchcock’s term, that reaches its epic, mind-boggling climax in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The ...”

“... blame it on the EU, and begin storytelling. Abstract principles such as the right to cultural self-determination for minority peoples are there to lend lustre to your defence of your own people, not to help you identify the complaints of your people with the complaints of others, because that’s what they are: others. The Brexiteers’ opponents, the ...”

“... engagement with their precursors. By ‘great labour’ Eliot appears to have in mind intense self-directed study, such as Milton’s five-year ‘studious retirement’ in his twenties. The goal Eliot envisions is to absorb your precursors so thoroughly that they speak in and through your work. This is not ...”