“... distaste for emotional display and always had one eye on his ‘cynical’ or commonsensical self-presentation. And this sometimes made things difficult for his admirers. Douglas soaked up their praise as if it meant not very much, got ratty when his work was criticised on technical grounds or found to be insufficiently ‘poetic’, and altogether made ...”

“... happy. Loneliness is one part of this. Their tremendous capacity for language, for perception and self-awareness, is reserved for the internal monologues that make up the books. With their loved ones they lie, withhold and dissemble, rarely risking vulnerability. To establish connection, or resolve conflict, they turn to sex – ‘the easiest lie’. They ...”

“... or remove the possibility that use of the islands could be hampered by external pressures for self-determination’. To achieve these goals the inhabitants were expelled. BIOT Immigration Ordinance No. 1, issued on 16 April 1971, made presence on the islands without military clearance a crime. Shortly thereafter the islanders were unceremoniously deported ...”

“... at the Art League in Manhattan. ‘I buried my former arrogance; a tendency towards nihilistic self-complacency was relegated to the deepest cellar of my being,’ he wrote. ‘Eventually I managed pleasant phrases and gave compliments that I only half believed. I learned how by praise one could teach the difficult skill of drawing.’ For the first few ...”

“... upbringing; there is a suggestion, in turn, that Miller’s confused sexuality and lack of self-control are consequences of his mother’s emotional abuse. Trauma, for Wallace, is a family inheritance: his grandmother believed that his mother’s rape, from which his older brother was conceived, was her own fault – she ‘got what she had ...”

“... abstracted, inattentive, haughty-seeming; Carmel’s older brother, Richie, an alcoholic and self-confessed failure; their father, John, silent and invalided, devastated by the loss of his second wife, Rose; and Lucy herself, ‘known universally as trouble’. When Mia’s body is found on the estate the next day, her neck suspiciously bruised, Tom’s ...”

“... view that the Malvinas Islands were an extension of the South American Continental Shelf, and self-evidently belonged to the South American state four hundred miles away, rather than to some European state eight thousand miles away. Subsequently, as a Member of the indirectly-elected European Parliament, I attended two sessions of European-Latin American ...”

“... shouldn’t own a relic connected with his better-known namesake. This someone was the self-styled Marie Corelli (whose real name was Mary Mackay), bestselling novelist and spiritualist, who was probably one inspiration for E.F. Benson’s Lucia, and was certainly the most conspicuous if not the most talented writer ever to live in ...”

“... wasn’t entirely outrageous: townsmen and even some lords sympathised, if not out of charity then self-interest, given that social discord threatened all order and prosperity. Serfdom was permitted by civil law but was at odds with the consensual social relations that had evolved from ancient usage. Furthermore, Roper writes, as earnest defenders of the ...”

“... impulse could create. As late as the 20th century, the Skoptsy sect in Russia was still preaching self-mutilation as the godly response to sexual cravings. Christian authorities in every age have defended their teachings by reference to the Bible. MacCulloch patiently explains the many problems with this, in a fashion that will no doubt leave biblical ...”

“... Too often in history, it was argued, the vigilance and civic virtue required to sustain republican self-rule had dissipated, and the ensuing corruption, chaos and division had paved a path to dictatorship for a Caesar or a Cromwell. Republican government wasn’t thought compatible with territorial extent on the American scale. Small city-states had proved ...”

“... I was being paid to say what was there, not to critique it; but, where I could, I inserted a self-deprecating inflection, leaving my tongue in the great man’s cheek. These days, I usually get a couple of weeks with the manuscript before recording, to check pronunciations, especially pertinent with, for example, Brazilian Portuguese, which can be a ...”

“... Kosovo doesn’t have full autonomy and remains highly dependent on Washington. The left-leaning Self-Determination Movement, which has governed Kosovo since 2021 after emerging from its own protest movement, deleted pro-Palestine Facebook posts and articles on its website after taking power, presumably to avoid offending Washington.Kosovars have been paying ...”

“... crazy parties, leopardskin pants and a pony-tail. But now her parents are puzzled. Where is their self-centred daughter? She hasn’t gone to town. Come on. You come down. * The publican wants God as a partner, the businessman, the wife, oh the girl with scars on her wrists taking her baby to God the shiftless drunk no one trusts who lives in a packing shed ...”