“... sunny, easy-going and benevolent figure that he depicts’. I would never have described Daley’s self-portrait in those terms. Daley is quite ferocious and unforgiving in his account of other policemen, especially those who taunted him about his homosexuality: Sergeant Hunter was a rat ... Without a friend in the world and incapable of any action that was ...”

“... will certainly outlive them both. He is his country’s most eminent writer, his works are few, self-contained (very Paraguayan) and brilliantly written. Yet his masterpiece, I the Supreme, which first came out in Spanish in 1974 and finally reaches the English reading public today, in a suitably masterful translation by Helen Lane, is the kind of summa ...”

“... it came back to me why I felt as I did. In the play, Ruth Kaplan charges Yaron with gross self-interest. She claims that Yaron’s reward for keeping silent about the fate he knew awaited the Hungarian Jews in the camps was that he, his family and his associates would be allowed to emigrate to Israel. Yaron’s defence is twofold. If he had not obeyed ...”

“... the London clubs which were coming into their own at this time, such behaviour reflected a more self-conscious and assertive masculine style. But this brittle machismo did not express itself in stiff upper lips, which were a Victorian and not a Georgian invention. Think of Burke in December 1792 flinging a dagger onto the floor of the Commons as a symbol of ...”

“... loved islands’. The story could just as well be about Lawrence himself, and shows the humorous self-perception of which he was capable: both men shared in their different ways the restlessness and the need for total dominance of a ‘perfect’ environment. ‘He wanted an island all of his own,’ writes Lawrence in the story: ‘not to be alone on ...”

“... Because marriage interrupted her while she was ‘still busy papier-mâchéing her own unfinished self’, her reactions are always framed in terms of what Cal would think: at first she backs the offending design because he would have – as a teenager he left his parents’ country club because it excluded blacks and Jews. But the Times architecture critic ...”

“... to anything.’ But for middle-class women even adaptability and talent could not guarantee self-sufficiency. For all the distinction of her writing, Christina Rossetti was never able to secure an adequate income. Her attempts to do so by founding a school with her mother, as Elizabeth Sewell had done with her sister, ended in failure. For most of her ...”

“... Maurice Cowling was the English intelligentsia’s self-appointed pantomime ogre. Hamming up his villainy, he deliberately courted boos and hisses. In 1990, on the publication of the second edition of his book Mill and Liberalism (1963), he remembered with delight that one of its original reviewers had ‘obligingly’ described it as ‘“dangerous and unpleasant”, which was what it was intended to be ...”

“... end is honest. It is also flagrantly disrespectful of other countries’ rights to sovereignty and self-determination. The Kremlin, for example, initially denied any involvement in the 2014 annexation of Crimea: Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, described the forces that seized control of the peninsula as local ‘...”

“... to say that ‘food is not a commodity like others. We should go back to a policy of maximum food self-sufficiency. It is crazy for us to think we can develop countries around the world without increasing their ability to feed themselves.’ There are at least two things to add here. First, developed Western countries have taken great care to maintain their ...”

“... them, it has to be said, lived all that easy a life (even if a good few of the difficulties were self-inflicted, no burden feels lighter because of that). Perhaps the obvious explanation as to why these brilliant men were so bored is the simplest one: life, for them, was boring. Life was changing in ways which made it less boring to be an upper-middle-class ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from Darcy and realises that she has been ‘blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd’, this moment of self-knowledge also represents, Cavell says, her knowledge of being known, of being acknowledged, ‘as if until then her existence had been denied, had suffered the polite scepticism – the little deaths – of everyday life.’ Cynics, Cavell goes on to ...”

“... everything and everyone and in the end seems madder than her mother. She slides into excruciating self-exposure, to the point of confessing her sexual frustration to the resolutely silent official. Salvayre repeatedly throws the women’s logorrhea against the man’s taciturnity, playing the bathos for all it’s worth: the mother fulminates, the daughter ...”