“... version of Dan Leno: he does songs, he falls on his arse, he has trouble with machines, with self-worth, and he goes in for disguises, catchphrases, patter and multiple personalities. The old comics were human, of course, but the startling thing about the newer television cartoon characters is that they often appear more human than real people, more ...”

“... fundamental national rights of the Palestinian people. The document could not advance Palestinian self-determination, Said maintained, because self-determination entails freedom, sovereignty and equality.In my article I put the case for the Accord. It was obvious that the document fell a long way short of the Palestinian ...”

“... King School in Akron, Ohio, in June 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous has grown into the largest secular self-help organisation in the Western world. With its ten million members, it’s bigger than the Freemasons, the Rotarians, the TUC, the White Aryan Resistance, the Samaritans, the KKK, the Women’s Institute and – in terms of weekly attendance – the Church ...”

“... been invested with some of the Left’s more romantic aspirations. There is probably an element of self-delusion in this. Migrants are heroes of the Left only in the host country, not in the nations from which they come; and if you call them settlers instead, they immediately appear in a rather different light. Nevertheless, migration remains significant for ...”

“... sees a role for a charismatic Head, at least in a school’s popular reputation and its own self-imaging. But outside factors beyond any Head’s control, as well as sheer economics, are almost always more significant in ensuring that a school thrives. More often than not, periods of apparent decline at Harrow, measured crudely by pupil ...”

“... its maximum gestural impact.When he slipped away from England and his first wife in 1898, for a self-appointed exile in Dieppe, Paris and Venice, Sickert left behind a reputation as foremost apostle to the ‘genius’, he whose ‘lightest utterance is inspired’, the ‘immortal’, London’s ‘living Old Master’. Whistler was his first point of ...”

“... mimicking exactly what his father and grandfather did before him, are often both clichéd and self-conscious. Yet what follows is unconscionable: And then, when the bottle was gone, I danced. Slowly at first. But getting faster. I stomped my feet and kicked my legs, joints cracking. I pounded my feet and crouched and kicked in the dance my father ...”

“... on all counts. Far from being a half-educated dilettante, he was, they write, ‘essentially, and self-consciously, a trained modern staff officer’. His abiding affection for the horse notwithstanding, he demonstrated a keen interest in hurrying into battle new technologies such as gas, the aeroplane and the tank. However much he might grouse in private ...”

“... 50 million population of the United Kingdom. This seems to me to be a case where our principle of self-determination ought to take second place behind the principle that in a democratic society the minority have to bow to the majority. But the islanders weren’t having any of this; and so successive British governments, clearly frightened of the public (or ...”

“... Drank some ’48 claret alone.’ At the same time, like many sybarites, he was drenched in self-pity, deploring the emptiness of a life of pleasure and, looking back, saw his existence as a dark tunnel. Simplicity of life was the only answer, but one not adopted at Mentmore, where, as that waspish paedophile Loulou Harcourt claimed, ‘truffles seem to ...”

“... other people’), whereas Murry’s frankness was often a kind of falsity arising from his deep self-deception. It was the shining earnestness of this self-deception that initially appealed to people. He radiated ‘a kind of religious enthusiasm’, Huxley remarked. ‘At first, people tended to catch fire from this ...”

“... transform it by degrees and by logical extension to a point where fantasy had become reality. The self-reflecting fiction at the centre of the play is perhaps one of those conceits that many writers new to a form are tempted to exploit. As it turned out, it was not, as I had feared, too literary or undramatic. It simply became a feature of the central ...”

“... translators are prone to favour, in my experience, as being an ideal compromise between their self-esteem and that chronic sense of betrayal of the original which haunts their working days. (The giving of marks in itself is a reminder that translation begins at school, and that it remains a discipline more than an art.) During breaks from A la ...”

“... natural superiority … was modelled on the heroes of John Buchan: decent, anti-intellectual, self-deprecating and eternally stiff of upper lip’. Sometimes, the officer in Russia actually was one of Buchan’s or Rudyard Kipling’s heroes: Brigadier-General Ironside, earlier encountered by Buchan in Africa after the Second Boer War, served as ...”

“... ruthless, underhanded son of a bitch’. With Barnes, there was no middle ground, minuscule self-doubt and no remorse over those he belittled, slandered and discarded; you were either in or, forever, out. As is often the case with those described as ‘complex’, Barnes had only two gears: forward or reverse, nice or nasty, the latter mode suddenly ...”