“... has been generous enough to embody all the creeping horrors of corporate opportunism, all the self-serving, reflex mendacity of political operators with a more emollient pitch. The man is visible. He is loud enough to be heard across oceans. Nobody told this brainwashed Manchurian Candidate that he was supposed to shoot the president, not grab the throne ...”

“... where he arrived at a therapeutic view of singing: good music was the objective, and painful self-discovery the process. Taking the Orpheus myth as a model, Wolfsohn asked his students to descend into themselves and retrieve the inspiration that had drawn them to singing in the first place (Orfeo ed Eurydice is one of several musical references in ...”

“... can rarely have felt so personally implicated in a piece of writing. He doesn’t shy away from self-examination: his relationships with the key actors are made clear, as are his ethical dilemmas as a journalist, trying to maintain both political commitment and critical independence. It is a far more honest account of those difficulties than is ever given ...”

“... of the actual economy. The result is liberating in its overturning of a simplistic faith in the self-regulating perfection of free trade or flexible markets, but it also creates an opportunity for heterodox economists and disreputable policy entrepreneurs. Upholding the rigour and status of proper economics thus requires vigilant policing. Summers, for ...”

“... These men took on London, its sticky clay, its buried rivers and polluted air, its monumental self-interest and its blind faith in scientific progress. The original calculation was generous, tunnels constructed to accommodate a rising population. But hardly at the rate that transpired: London’s population doubled between the start of work in the 1850s ...”

“... the monument. It’s at its best when it is all dressed up, most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ‘Victorian’ Harris fretted about the 19th century’s inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that ...”

“... for the players, and later died from gangrene: an allegory perhaps of Tár’s own remorseless self-devastation.In Lully’s time the orchestra was in its infancy. The Vingt-Quatre Violons du Roi was a crack ensemble, famous throughout Europe for its musical discipline and virtuosity, but it was something of an exception. For the kings and princes of the ...”

“... Bigger ‘the black rebel of the ghetto’, with ‘no trace … of the Martin Luther King-type self-effacing love for his oppressors’. For Cleaver, who wrote in his memoir that he had practised raping black women before graduating to white women, Bigger embodied an authentic, revolutionary black masculinity that Baldwin, a gay man, naturally despised.The ...”

“... the state to the invigorating effects of regular purges, which are said to be necessary for ‘self-revolution’. China, which in the post-Cold War period was viewed as either lunch for American capital or an irredeemable dungeon, has acquired under Xi a third face in the West as a powerful threat to the American empire.Xi has personalised power, but he ...”

“... violent outbursts of temper, vanity. Occupational hazards of high office, no doubt. Yet however self-satisfied, few politicians could write, as Nehru did before his death, that no one had ever been loved so much by millions of his compatriots. Abstemious in many other ways, and little attracted to the supernatural, his opiate – as another admirer, the ...”

“... head and features, reminded me of one of those pink axolotls that float penis-like in aquaria. My self-image was not helped by people mistaking me for Peter in subsequent years. Having difficulty standing up, I was sitting cross-legged on a table. He introduced himself, congratulated me on a piece I had written and suggested we should get in contact as he ...”

“... all round the country, purporting to represent local black communities. Most of these consisted of self-appointed élites who imposed their will on their communities by fairly robust means, but they generally represented the temper of the times far better than the Uncle Tom municipal councillors they displaced. The Civics have continued into the new era as ...”

“... you cease folking up the literature, and you become “universal” [i.e., address the ‘narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe’] – or else you perish in the backwater of small presses, you don’t get published by the “quality” presses, and you don’t receive the corresponding patronage of media-hype ... The pressure is to become a mulatto and ...”

“... his epigrammatic analyses of Kubrick’s character are clever and plausible, they have the air of self-contained fictions, unruffled by any complication or resistance in the object of study. ‘The recluse imagines that if he can reduce the possibility of surprises the world will become orderly, but the more order he contrives, the more it is vulnerable to ...”

“... create an Englishman of the Imperial decadence, a contemplative aesthete, incapable of action, who self-consciously reflects the mood of an inglorious period of English history. ‘Peterley [the house] seems now to be merely the symbol of an England that is lost for ever,’ Mr Pennington makes David Peterley write before casting off for Australia early in ...”