“... the need never to be wrong. Just as Donne was Empson’s preferred sensibility – his most vivid self-portrait is his portrait of Donne in his great essay of 1957, ‘Donne the Space Man’, in which Donne is referred to as an ‘intellectual buccaneer’ of ‘defiant brilliance’ – the Judeo-Christian God’s was the sensibility he dreaded, never in ...”

“... cockney wideboys in British gangster flicks. Xan – who shares his surname with Duane Meo, John Self’s ‘whizzkid editor’ in Money – is sardonically described as a ‘Renaissance Man’: he has published a short story collection called Lucozade, and plays rhythm guitar in a Camden café ‘every second Wednesday’. His old man, Mick Meo ...”

“... The reader is invited to fall in with a persona of Baedekered cosmopolitanism and sensual self-assurance. ‘We are prepared to enjoy stone in the South. For, as we come to the southern light of the Mediterranean, we enter regions of coherence and of settled forms.’ The prose nimbly sidesteps stock wordings and standard speech rhythms: ‘Stone ...”

“... all-powerful and yet in constant danger of collapse; the people who observe it from outside, self-styled experts, see it as either a historically explicable economic system or a timeless mythic structure. Once they enter that structure themselves, however, they find it bears little correspondence to the map of it they have drawn with their ...”

“... in March 2003, three days after George Bush had gone to war in Iraq, came across as grandiose and self-important. ‘We like non-fiction and we live in fictitious times,’ he bellowed, dragging his fellow documentary nominees on stage with him. Coming from someone whose films have always depended on picking the facts to suit the story, this seemed a bit ...”

“... close friend, though I never really liked him, and found something threatening about his tough and self-reliant mind … He allowed me to tag along with him, but regarded my endless curiosity and roaming around the camp as a waste of time and energy … His parents were interned in Peking, but he never spoke about them, which baffled me at the time, and I ...”

“... The quirkiest​ of the British Isles is a self-governing jurisdiction between Guernsey and France just over three miles long and less than two miles wide. Sark has its own parliament, its own taxes and its own traffic laws (permitting only tractors, bikes and horse-drawn vehicles). Its central, fertile plateau is protected by cliffs on almost all sides that rise to over three hundred feet ...”

“... But you’ve killed me!’ Barbara Comyns’s daughter, Caroline, recognised her younger self in Fanny, the little girl who dies of scarlet fever in Comyns’s second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. ‘Poor, beautiful little Fanny! her life had been wasted because of stupidity and poverty.’ On its first publication in 1950, when Caroline was fifteen, Comyns insisted on the insertion of a qualifying sentence at the beginning to the effect that ‘the only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters Ten, Eleven and Twelve and the poverty ...”

“... of life … everybody seemed to fall in love with her’. She knew the effect she had and she was self-possessed and confident enough to exploit it. She posed nude with her pictures, was a dancer on the TV show Ready Steady Go!, and appeared in other films as well as Russell’s, including Alfie with Michael Caine. How much of her reputation came from her ...”

“... title, the salience of the line from the Declaration of Independence being that the truths are self-evident, not the holding of them – is a campaign book, written in collaboration with a pair of Washington speechwriters, Vinca LaFleur and Dylan Loewe (‘You made this process a joy,’ Harris tells them in the acknowledgments). It makes for dreary ...”

“... is possible. Pushing the boundaries requires a clear sense of what the boundaries are. Cultures of self-expression are sometimes also cultures of heightened social formality taken to the point at which mastery is its own kind of subversion. Was Oscar Wilde oppressed by the rules of high Victorian manners? No, because it was a scoring system he could master and ...”

“... an excuse for indulgence, but it would be hard to find anyone who thinks that this sort of self-justification is rational behaviour. Something similar applies to procrastination. You can always tell yourself that it doesn’t matter if you put off a piece of work until tomorrow, but do you really think that this is a rational way to carry on, given the ...”

“... of disinterested inquiry and the transmission of a cultural and intellectual inheritance are self-evident public goods; and so on. While that conception of a university and its purposes is still very much alive and may, I suspect, still be the one held by a great many ‘ordinary’ citizens, we may be nearing the point, at least in Britain, where it is ...”

“... was charged with manslaughter. Wang took the case on, entering a plea of not guilty on grounds of self-defence. The trial began early this year. When the judge rejected her request to authenticate footage the prosecutors claimed had been captured by surveillance cameras, she walked out of court and held up a placard outside the building, condemning the ...”

“... as Sarah Bastard’s Notebook. In this book, Engel produced an interior monologue every bit as self-hating as those can sometimes be – the inner voice that mocks you in the voice of your mother. It is funny, deadly funny, but mostly on a second read. On the first you hear the sentences in your own deepest and most ...”