“... in. Snipers’ pillboxes and signs warning of unexploded mines remained, and so did the now-fading self-importance that comes to a place taught to think of itself as being on the front line of imminent invasion. Above the high-tide line, the beach was a broad ridge of hard-to-walk-on pebbles, where a cluster of scruffy boats was drawn up beside the twin huts ...”

“... because of its anticipated practical effects, and because it seemed to fit with his rather self-conscious defiance of convention and religion. He was also responding to the industrial conflicts of early 20th-century America. A speech given by the labour organiser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a silk-workers’ strike in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913 ...”

“... more remote than Stafford’s Boston. I’m stalled on the threshold of Boston Adventure by the self-consciousness of the highly wrought prose. By contrast, the first half of Stafford’s second novel, The Mountain Lion, is breathtakingly original and flies free of what feels mannered and dated elsewhere in her work. Some of her short stories are also very ...”

“... saw how the pope’s death unravelled the once fearsome duke, who was ‘carried away by that bold self-confidence of his’, ranting and raving with ‘words full of poison and anger’. His state was lost. Machiavelli reflected in The Prince that Cesare had ‘acquired his state with the Fortuna of his father and lost it with the same, though he had taken ...”

“... you know. They’re thugs’), just setting out a bowl of milk. When Otto accuses her of self-indulgence, she replies: ‘I don’t care why I’m doing it. The point is that I can see it starving.’ So when the cat shows up that evening, Sophie caresses its back: She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human ...”

“... He appears to have started off with good intentions. At their first meeting he told Hastings self-deprecatingly that ‘any newspaper that attempted to impose my convictions on its readership would be in danger of possessing a circulation of one.’ But if this was a sincere commitment to the notion of editorial independence it did not last long. A few ...”

“... in a review of two of the 1951 volumes, Nottinghamshire and Cornwall. In less out-doorsy, more self-consciously cultivated circles the new guides, with their unmistakably foreign approach, got a mixed reception. John Summerson, reviewing them for the New Statesman, felt a need to bring his readers, and indeed himself, round to the idea. ‘Books on the ...”

“... is mild domestic psychosis and there are soft furnishings. All art is the art of real estate and self-help. The universe described is a middle-class America, a place of spiritual lassitude and window-blinds. Market populism travels in through the air-conditioning and fastens to the red blood cells. And in these lives, and in the books and films that venture ...”

“... the Nazi commitment would not slacken, that the search for a solution one way or another to this self-imposed problem would not fade away into obscurity or be indefinitely postponed. No leading Nazi could prosper who did not appear to take the Jewish question as seriously as Hitler did himself. Note the ‘...”

“... to able to be speak for a whole tribe. The basic social unit was the tiyospaye, an economically self-sufficient village or lodge group of interrelated families that acted together during the year. Although this sort of complexity makes it difficult to associate any modern tribal identity with prehistoric sites, Gibbon carefully and convincingly links the ...”

“... to its meaning. Merton (who was himself a gifted minter of new words and phrases, including ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and ‘focus group’), and Elinor Barber, a historian, set out to chart the picaresque career of ‘serendipity’ in the 1950s, when the word had crossed over from the realm of literary arcana to that of scientific buzzwords, but had ...”

“... readers, meanwhile, having availed themselves of the opportunity to indulge, ever so briefly, in self-loathing, put down their newspapers and themselves move on to other things. Nothing has changed, but columnist and readers alike feel better for the cathartic effect of this oblique, reassuring encounter with an alien world. Today, having dissolved any ...”

“... have been the main characters. The parents are, without exception, chronically unhappy and self-obsessed (in The Rules of Attraction, ‘The Freshman band is called The Parents – that’s enough to send out some message to people’s feelers that something wrong is going down’). And the childhood memories that occur fleetingly throughout the novels ...”

“... professionalism in which they conceal themselves behind thickets of technicality and an equally self-indulgent form of popularisation in which the proportion of rhetoric to argument is unduly high. It is, then, something of an event when a book appears in which the central task which laymen demand of the philosopher – that of providing a clear and ...”

“... citizens to cheat, to lie, to fake the results of experiments, and to practise delusion – and self-delusion – on a scale which has almost become institutional? Second, why does society pay so much credulous attention to them? Is it really ‘normal’ for the rest of us to treat tricksters, hysterics, charlatans and practical jokers as if they were ...”