“... but insecure London. All That Man Is is a suite of nine moral stories (unconnected, but self-assembled in the reader’s mind into a sort of collage-novel) persuasively set in different milieux across a new, East-ish, un-glam, second-tier or easyJet Europe – not Athens, Barcelona, Paris and Rome, but Charleroi, Frankfurt-Hahn, Katowice, Larnaca ...”

“... are by Schipper’s definition conservative, and they present their tendentious opinions as self-evident truths about human nature. Layered with caustic, tongue-in-cheek ambiguity, gnomic utterances are like oracles in their contradictions and double entendres. Schipper’s working definition of the proverb ignores the issue of gnomes, but her ...”

“... and motivations of British officials’ had destroyed the ‘myths’ of the efficiency and ‘self-sacrificial esprit de corps’ of the ICS. The main problem with Spangenberg’s ‘scrutiny’ is that it ignored almost all the private papers of ICS officers that he could easily have studied. Yet the limitations of the thesis did not deter a bevy of ...”

“... attention from, the role of imperialism in Americans’ own state formation, foreign policy and self-image. At another, it has become an article of faith with many Americans that it was European imperialism which gave birth to the racial animosities and attitudes that so trouble their own society, and that only by a thorough and sceptical excavation of ...”

“... What this pure Geistesgeschichte underplays is a sense of context. Greenough recognised, partly in self-criticism, that in a new country the old classical ‘character’ would not do: America, he says, must find its own forms. Only in a continent with an infinity of practical tasks before it and a boundless biology of its own to explore could ‘form follows ...”

“... is characteristic. His poems shrink interestingly from the single, arrogating point of view, the self-possessed lyric ‘I’. You, I, he, she, we, it are liable to take each other’s place without warning, until, as ‘The Barber’s Beard’ puts it: Jack and the poet and the pronouns shrug, take a breath each, and melt into the blue. It is with the ...”

“... Between one dash and the next, as in the passage below, his passions move from an imagined self-assertion (as a cannibal, no less) to an imputed self-abasement (shame, deceit, cowardice). – and there was something unnatural and at first glance even enigmatic in the passionate and almost reverential way in which ...”

“... not indicate the year), Castro suggested to his hosts that he might engage in an act of public self-criticism for the many anti-Soviet comments he had made since the time of the Missile Crisis. The Russians advised him not to make any such self-criticism. They had invested a lot of capital in building up the image and ...”

“... themselves. This exhibition asks both, without labouring the point or falling away from self-awareness into self-regard. In the early part of the show, we move from images of forest savages, hybrids and wild women, up through prints of humans bubbling away in cooking pots (Grands Voyages de Théodore de ...”

“... 2012, and even when they do, the scenery is pretty inconsequential. Surprisingly, Essex is rather self-effacing. Nikolaus Pevsner’s introduction to his Buildings of England volume for Essex made it clear that he considered the county tainted by association. Who, he wondered in 1954, would ever want to go ‘touring and sightseeing’ there, after ...”

“... be called Tory and Whig. This secrecy also allowed for corrupt bargains, unholy alliances and the self-interested actions for which the members of this Long Parliament became famous. It may also account for the paucity of sources from which historians can derive the Long Parliament’s history. The first half of Patterson’s study is an examination of those ...”

“... on the loose: it’s an alternative account, and it has its own narrative. It’s not only a self-justifying means of expression for a man who has no other outlet, whose real voice nobody otherwise will ever hear; it also has a notional addressee: the rich, the fat, the smug. And it isn’t quite as ingenuous as it sounds. As it builds to a climax, it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the French story that it could have been nothing else. And Maurycy Szczucki, our unrelenting self-investigator, is propelled into new roles as accomplice, husband, useful idiot and prisoner, going from being an existential journeyman to a deep causal agent, lifting the lid on questions of love and loyalty as he goes. He may be a victim of the 20th ...”

“... is present from the moment the first of the protagonists, Justine, goes for an early-morning run: self-vaunting about her fitness, she turns out to have a heart murmur, ‘like a fish flopping’, and has been told never to go running alone. As the hours pass and each character in turn steps centre-stage, tensions build. Everyone’s worried about ...”