“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... causal links that shape this happy outcome. If he wants to argue that the members engage in self-deception, then he should say so – and also sketch an account of that notoriously elusive phenomenon. In Bourdieu’s universe there are only snobs, at least according to what I shall call his official view. Everybody is all the time looking over his ...”

“... combined with the relative impotence of medicine, was responsible for the traditional rivalry of self-esteem between physicians and surgeons, as I suppose it may have been for the apostasy that made old Dr Thomas give up medicine for surgery. Therapeutic nihilism, says Lewis, was a ‘reaction to the kind of medicine taught and practised in the early part of ...”

“... point with such extravagant gusto. But others felt a distaste for our press then, and do now. How self-righteous it can be, and how outrageous. Today Americans would add: how powerful. Our papers no longer have to retail fancies of the crimes committed by political leaders in childhood. We have a press that exposes real official wrongs: a press which helped ...”

“... but they could not bear to see it befouled by warmongers and racists. All of them could see the self-evident connection between the rise of the war party in Washington and the defeat of civil rights and the ‘Great Society’. Many of them came from families where military service was a proud axiom. All of them felt guilty and indebted for their luck. At ...”

“... Wagner transcriptions on the piano to drown his despair); Frau Tuzzi’s self-deluded love for the Prussian financier and polymath Paul Arnheim; the poet Feuermaul’s flatulentverse. But the ferocity of these attacks argues for the importance of what is being defended. The experience of soul is made central to Ulrich’s intellectual ...”

“... increasing degrees of specificity) as an Eastern European Jew, an Ashkenazi and a Litvak, but this self-identification, I have to acknowledge, is strange. It is true that my grandparents were born in Lithuania: my father’s parents in Kovna, my mother’s in Vilna. But they left for America sometime in the early 1890s, and, with a single exception, it was ...”

“... changed Yeats’s view of himself, as well as how others saw him: a process that fed back into the self and shadow presented in the verse. So an account of the growth of his mind has to be steeped in literary analysis to a degree unusual in biography. The problem is the more pressing because Yeats freed himself to write by striking attitudes, assuming personas ...”

“... at the leash’ to join in. Ordinary trade unionists were both selfless and self-interested. Many knew that their employers would like to follow the mine-owners in depressing wages and conditions; as one NUR poster proclaimed, ‘Solidarity … will safeguard your own position.’ But for many, ‘the call of fellowship and ...”

“... Rolex and Vacheron Constantin watches worth more than $100,000. ‘Watch Brother’ symbolised the self-enriching, out of touch, corrupt side of the CCP. This​ was the context for Document Number Nine, and it was also the point at which the CCP launched its counterattack. First, the Weibo accounts of prominent critics were ‘harmonised’ – in other ...”

“... Union Jacks hanging limp at either side of the podium suggest a newish nation-state searching for self-confidence, one of the lesser-known stans perhaps. The lectern has ‘DOWNING STREET’ gilded on it, as though we might forget where we are.But the gimcrack fixtures and fittings should not delude us. This is intended to be a crucial new space in British ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Man, whose mentality was once described by Esmond Romilly as a ‘mixture of profit-seeking, self-interest, cheap emotion and organised brutality’, and his reflections on the cargo plane struck exactly the note of amoral, self-pitying, tinpot fatalism adopted by most Nazi and SS survivors facing defeat and ...”

“... spa town, Pechorin befriends a like-minded doctor called Werner. The two men, Pechorin thinks with self-satisfaction, share a cold egotism: ‘Sad things are funny to us. Funny things are sad to us. And in general, to tell the truth, we are indifferent to everything apart from our selves.’ Pechorin delights in destroying the weak illusions of this ...”