“... options to justify going to war in Iraq. They could argue that they were acting against Iraq in self-defence. But plainly they weren’t. They could argue there was a humanitarian crisis looming. There wasn’t. The only remaining way to go to war legally was to get Security Council authorisation. Greenstock found the possibility that the Americans would ...”

“... to be selling. The Democrats made the mistake of assuming that his vulgarity and ignorance were self-evident: the voters had only to see them to know he was unfit for the presidency. This year, they made the same mistake, and they came eerily close to a second disaster. Biden-Harris lost Florida, where they could have clinched a victory early on election ...”

“... school experience a nightmare. He’d left school at thirteen and embarked on a life of unofficial self-employment, beginning with a surprisingly popular line in repairing sash window cords door-to-door; later, he ran a garage out of a London squat. My brother, fourteen years older than me, also found himself out of the school system early, ultimately leaving ...”

“... the offices of Cauce, the story becomes fact: ‘I’m not imagining that part; I read it.’This self-consciousness leads Fernández to devise a series of analogies – from Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight to a Chris Marker documentary about the Pacific War and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – to help her navigate the territory. Some are more successful than ...”

“... where Arthur Street spent his boyhood in the first decade of the 20th century was the centre of a self-sufficient community, stout in defence of the four-course rotation and despising anything shop-bought. There was a ‘spaciousness and an aura of solid wellbeing’ in this intermission between agricultural slumps. The primary concern of a large tenant ...”

“... prince is looking for a princess. His ageing mother clearly won’t do for the part. Blinkered by self-absorption, he is not prepared to notice on his return form Paris signs of the heart disease which abruptly ends Mrs Percy’s patient life. Lewis is devastated, and bewildered. His educated idealism has not adapted him for domesticity and grief. ‘Life ...”

“... be the result of the greater seriousness and scale of the undertaking. But there is a good deal of self-criticism in the press, and evidence of a bad conscience about the country’s absurd dependency on cheap oil and on the political arrangements necessary to guarantee it. I think, also, that there is a vague impression that Arab nationalism might have a ...”

“... then, and tells us that avoiding it has become a preoccupation now. Nevertheless, behind his self-castigation a certain complacency seems to lurk. The impression may partly be created by the mature Julian’s intermittent reflections on life in general: these tend towards a weary fatalism of tone which in turn creates an exonerating context for the ...”

“... for women. Family resources enabled her to acquire a university education, and she was financially self-sufficient throughout her long career. A friendship with George Gissing (they corresponded at least once a week for ten years) admitted her to a world of artistic achievement. She embodies the independence of the new woman. Yet she emerges from Jane ...”

“... close of the 15th century. It is the Marrano configuration of spirit and language, of conduct and self-consciousness, with its literally numberless nuances of dissimulation, of doubt, of anguished scepticism and remorse, which, according to Yovel, is the source and informing dominant in the entirety of Spinoza’s life and labours. This is not a novel ...”

“... to be ashamed of – though ‘taking the Fifth’ (as invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination was called at the time) was never a very impressive public posture. But what they plainly felt entitled to in their old age was their privacy – and to see their son, of all people, invading it can hardly have made their distress any easier to ...”

“... Louis Seynaeve, who is ten years old at the time of Munich, grows up in an enclosed and self-righteous little community in Catholic West Flanders. The Seynaeves are anti-semitic (though until the outbreak of war Louis has never set eyes on a Jew), anti-socialist, anti-French, anti-Protestant, anti-Brussels and anti-government. Their right-wing ...”

“... that morning was of German professional competence and decent seriousness and British self-love and exhibitionism. Not everyone has admired Lord Hailsham as he unquestionably admires himself. The tone is beautifully echoed in Hailsham’s account of his meeting with Khrushchev. ‘Khrushchev was a countryman to his fingertips. The only man I have ...”

“... desultorily in a sea of Elizabeth. She was a copious, enthusiastic, fluent correspondent; he a self-conscious and anxious one. She enjoyed receiving letters as much as writing them, even when she was being used as a nominal addressee of travel letters intended for publication: ‘I accept with open hands – arms your correspondence,’ she wrote to Mary ...”

“... took a wrong turning: The new Cartesian distinction between the res cogitans, or thinking self, and the res extensa, or embodied substance, sets up the terms for the objectivity of science and [its] abstraction from historicity, location, nature and culture. What interests us about Descartes in this context is the fact that he sought to empower the ...”