“... expense than importing it from abroad would entail. It was part of the country’s drive for self-sufficiency. The result was a permanent fuel shortage. Although Albania now imports most of its oil with Western help, hundreds of oil derricks are still nodding away, pumping up oil that has no market. Rivers of crude just continue to flow, slowly seeping ...”

“... his acknowledgment that it shows perfectly the narrator ‘in his real colours, as the fantastic self wno hates and refuses contact with reality.’ The combination of that reality-hating self with a relentlessly logical mind finicky in its demand for accuracy gives Poe’s most outrageous stories their unique flavour, and ...”

“... of powerlessness: the powerlessness of the subject, whether alive or not, to detach him or her self from the simulacrum that is being produced. Sometimes Hugh David loses confidence in his own process, and has to reassure himself and the reader by repeating a catchphrase of the period at the end of a paragraph. Today the Struggle ... or, rather ...”

“... language generally devoted to notions of stubborn defensiveness (‘stonewalling’), or patient, self-denying collaboration (‘keeping your end up’), or long experience (‘a good innings’), or humorous cunning (‘yorker’, ‘googly’, ‘chinaman’), or occasional bafflement (‘stumped’), and only in a few instances of vainglorious triumph ...”

“... Sarah does not find fulfilment with either of her new loves. What she does find is knowledge, self-knowledge first and then knowledge of others. She perceives that the small theatrical company she had worked with for years in a close and productive professional relationship had been a family for her, a product of the kind of healing substitution that ...”

“... leave it for others to enjoy. But even nationalist destruction took second place to mercantile self-interest. Roofs were dismantled, window-frames stripped from walls and plumbing torn out of floors and carted away. Some looted for profit; others hoped they could refabricate homes elsewhere, in the shells of buildings destroyed after their Muslim owners ...”

“... which is all beginning all beginning still yet if I wanted to put a date when this naked shivering self began to puzzle at print sound spokensound the wind in the reeds or a cry in the street I’d choose that room for a start the bangles the curtain rings – it’s my baby tuckoo tuckoo tuckoo it is not the tundish this is echt British except that’s always ...”

“... rarely found elsewhere. Unrequited resentment is the source of this propensity, not romantic self-indulgence or nostalgia standing in for nationhood. Since Walter Scott’s time the wound has been bandaged up in kitsch, of course. But the dressings have become so famously elaborate only because the cut went so deep. Will it ever be healed? Perhaps, but ...”

“... often in the works of Philip Larkin? And which of these two poets would you reckon was the more self-centred, fond of flowers, susceptible to hyphens, keen on using the word mother? Such are the questions that can spin off from too many hours spent browsing in the realms of the Concordance. It so happens that both Larkin and Eliot have lately had their ...”

“... and so must churn out images directed both inwards and outwards with inventive abandon. Marcos’s self-indulgent poetry, the battl re-enactments in Reality, the photo opportunities and Web pages should not be too hastily dismissed; even the EPR, the first of a number of retro Marxist-Leninist armed groups appearing in other states, have tried fielding a few ...”

“... conclude from all this that the Greek literature of the Roman Empire was decadent, fossilised and self-obsessed, a pale and lifeless shadow of the classical model it followed so slavishly. This has been, and remains, the opinion of many, and a general neglect is the result. Today, the greater part of this vast and various corpus remains unclaimed by ...”

“... our war’) could stand in the way of his plans. Campton’s fretfulness marks him as part of the self-indulgent expatriate community from which he imagines his art has set him apart: ‘These other men were whining at the interruption of their vile pleasures or their viler money-making; he, poor devil, was trembling for the chance to lay the foundation of a ...”

“... duty was to keep clear. Only ‘weak-chinned, weak-kneed liberals, social democrats and self-seeking gentlemen of no principles’ professed to believe otherwise. In Folsom’s unstructured account of the League’s history he comes back again and again to the question of the League’s Communist position. ‘Did the Communist Party control the ...”

“... the newspapers, coughing through his papirosi. Russian hospitality is complete and coercive, self-sacrificing and non-negotiable. I had with me my seven-year-old son, Jacob. We were given the smaller of the two rooms as our bedroom, while Sasha lodged with friends nearby, and Natasha, Tania and Nikolai slept in the larger room. No question of a hotel or ...”

“... wider than that of a mere transition from colonial to para-colonial institutions of African self-government, such as occurred around 1960. They are not thinking, that is, of the ending of the era of imperialism tout court, for they are too deeply versed in their subject to suppose that financial and trading imperialism can be anywhere near its ...”