“... When I was 16, I went to help another troop-leader with a difficult troop. Two nasty, self-righteous little boys brought a prisoner to him. ‘Here, Arfur. ’E swore!’ they said virtuously. Arfur responded: ‘Ow, pour some water dahn the bugger’s arm.’ That took the wind out of the little prigs’ sails. Even swear-words can be cleanly ...”

“... acts of persons. A related criticism concerns the old Durkheim’s image of the social world as a self-propelled system with causes ‘that are deterministic’ – a phrase the new translation omits completely. And some of the ten essays added at the back of this edition reveal that, at least in the later years of his life, Durkheim was somewhat ...”

“... a touch over his pupils’ heads, hoping his allusions will be ‘looked up’ and encourage self-improvement. A teacher may use this technique: but a novelist, supposedly talking with equals, may offend his readers and spoil his plain story, as Aldous Huxley did, making us feel he is patronising us, showing off. Burgess knows his pupils’ reluctance to ...”

“... what he defined as the homosexual community: the limp-wristed, lisping men who are sometimes the self-appointed representatives of homosexual love in our culture.’ Even when he accepted his impulses and initiated affairs with young men, Cheever continued to hide behind an image of himself as ‘a patrician, old-fashioned country gentleman’. These ...”

“... their stricken Jehovah, bed-ridden judge of their inadequacies. They suffer from introspection and self-doubt, and their efforts, pathetic or comical, lose the name of action. Father Bosco, a reluctant contender, meditates the possibility of turning the hotel into a haven for elderly priests; Joey buys himself a motor-boat, and an island from which to take a ...”

“... argue that as collectors of beautiful objects over time their families were thinking not merely of self-interest but of the national herutage.’ But as a historian who likes to keep his cards close to his chest, he does not disclose whether he finds this to be pathos, bathos or humbug. The evidence, and especially the lack of evidence, about the process of ...”

“... convictions, manifested by a written constitution whose truths all good citizens had to accept as self-evident. Some of them, hardening into a blind or blindfolded faith in ‘free enterprise’, or capitalism, have come to appear a good deal less so; perhaps for analogous reasons, the utility of the ‘culture’ concept has been coming under question, and ...”

“... element provides next to no restraint on the politician’s standing inclination to mistake self-interest for the national interest, and that ‘confidentiality’ has become a cloak for a political and administrative unwillingness to answer to the wretched public. The transformation of public attitudes effected by the activities of Mrs Thatcher and Sir ...”

“... diseases. On a Victorian family holiday in Italy, a young woman outwardly reconciled to flattened, self-forgetting spinsterhood suddenly sees the new prospect of a new sort of life; the young painter she has fallen in love with climbs into the Appennines the next day, achieves a remarkable sketch, glimpses his calling for the first time, and falls to his death ...”

“... franchise in a non-racial, federal (not confederal) South Africa and only wants the rights of self-chosen cultural groups recognised. Saul himself reinforces government propaganda when he equates ‘genuine democratisation and transfer of power to the black majority’. Post-Apartheid democracy is supposed to be non-racial, based on colourblind individual ...”

“... precarious structure of urban societies whose social cohesion depended on the orderly conduct of a self-regulating international economy. All the belligerent states sought therefore to pre-empt domestic collapse through a Napoleonic Vernichtungs strategie, aimed at the rapid overthrow of the enemy armies in the field. The task was beyond their powers, and in ...”

“... the smooth assurance he was ‘incessantly uncomfortable’ about himself. Social and artistic self-doubt seem to have been curiously mingled. He confessed near the end of his life that he had ‘never been part and parcel of the England he has loved’; told Ford Madox Ford (if the latter, so often untrustworthy, is to be believed) that he had never been ...”

“... the contracts from international donors; and $120 billion of overseas Libyan assets. The new self-appointed transitional government, with its expatriate professors, mid-level businessmen and aged dissidents, would struggle. Gaddafi himself predicted much of this. And it was easy in my first few hours in Libya to find evidence for this way of ...”

“... to take real steps towards disarmament. Otherwise, non-nuclear states will regard their demands as self-serving and hypocritical – reason enough to think about creating an arsenal of their own. It isn’t hard to guess how the Russians, the Chinese and other nuclear powers reacted to the US’s announcement. The Obama administration, which in public supports ...”

“... prince felt utterly useless: ‘fifty years, life therefore behind me, idle observer in daily self-denial, discipline practised over a lifetime, condemned passively to while away the final years.’ On 9 March 1888, two weeks before his 91st birthday, William I, German Emperor and King of Prussia finally died and Frederick III ascended the throne, but he ...”