“... supplies to frontline troops. Chekh describes them variously as noble and infuriating, kind and self-serving, materially generous but emotionally needy. They have passive-aggressive snits if you deny them a selfie or ‘don’t post a photo of a box of baked goods on Facebook’. Everything decent in Chekh’s bunker, apart from the chainsaw to cut wood for ...”

“... But the poetry took shape as a drama of desire, nagged by a suspicion that one can’t be a self by oneself. For every Auden poem that dares to hope the soul may ‘be weaned at last to independent delight’, there is a voice in the wings whispering something not unlike what Auden said of Oscar Wilde – ‘Alone, he does not know who he is.’ The ...”

“... Extravagance and self-indulgence were among the kinder accusations levelled at Orson Welles by industry chiefs. For the most part the charges were unjust. Not only was Welles possibly the most distinguished film artist to be abused and all but broken by the system, and by leading individuals within it (including politicians, newspaper magnates, journalists, gossip-columnists and even critics), he was possibly the least culpable ...”

“... 1848. The old order fell, not as the result of a great popular upheaval, but because it had lost self-confidence, was not prepared to defend itself, and crumbled at the first sign of urban insurrection. The exceptions of course were the Poles. There the Catholic Church had preserved across class barriers a stubborn and universal sense of national resistance ...”

“... psyche, from where we emerge feeling sympathy for the man’s plight and respect for his self-restraint. Setting the record straight is only a modest part of Carpenter’s project in this biography. His more ambitious aim is to relate Britten’s emotional and sexual life to his music. This is a tall order; it’s clear that Carpenter doesn’t ...”

“... only possible course of action was to hold press conferences with Western journalists: that was self-destructive and I think it was linked to the fact that they had right-wing and pro-capitalist positions. Young people simply stopped joining the dissidents and began to look for different solutions. We had discussion groups and studied left-wing Western ...”

“... casual bit of play with a stray loose end of the fabric, but before long the entire texture of the self is unravelled and comes apart. The whole process happens at an unsettling speed. Irony possesses an inherent tendency to gain momentum and not to stop until it has run its full course; from the small and apparently innocuous exposure of a small ...”

“... they see the world afresh with a gendered, if not Martian eye; questioners, dissenters and self-styled outcasts, they are among our most eloquent ‘inner émigrés’. Hence the enormous interest of Michèle Roberts’s contribution to the new Pandora anthology On Gender and Writing. In a volume remarkable for its intelligence and verve – one thinks ...”

“... nothing at all ‘Happened’ ... This absence of the explainable beyond the renewal of the self-containedness of the image     (One could go round and round This single and Sicilian less     Than happening) gives the sequence its beautiful and tough purity, as of those ‘clear-glassed windows/The clear day looking in’ which the poet ...”

“... talent and the authenticity merchants who sell him, of his contempt for his audience and the self-contempt that grows with his facility at pleasing the people. A Face in the Crowd comes from 1957: a post-McCarthy production, in which the ‘sponsors’ of Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith in the performance of his life) could be shown as creators and ...”

“... first undetectably, it would infect the North Korean body politic with the virus of information, self-consciousness and, eventually, rebellion. The dungeon in which North Koreans languish is more impenetrable than the Iron Curtain ever was, and Choco Pies alone will never have the allure of Levis and Audis. But seeds have germinated at Kaesong which could ...”

“... and a certain kind of actor, heroes of moral struggle face difficulties as they age. Principled self-sacrifice is tough to sustain over a lifetime, and those who spend years on a pedestal frequently end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or ...”

“... a deceitful individual who blurs the distinction between the political and the economic out of self-interest. It stigmatises in foreigners precisely those features considered desirable in citizens: the desire to work, the will to self-improvement, and the willingness to invest one’s own human capital where it will ...”

“... alone’ – he should not be excited by his use of violence. National security demands a monkish self-denial, where officials forego the comforts of conscience and the pleasures of impulse in order to inflict when necessary the most brutal force and abstain from or abandon that force whenever it becomes counter-productive. It’s an ethos that bears all the ...”

“... of a search for alternatives and in the sense indicated by Romano, of sottogoverno, duplicity, self-interested manipulation and so on. The Italianate legend of Machiavellianism conflates the two things into one sinister image: ‘politics’ may accomplish miracles if sufficient virtu (cunning and will power) is put into it; or, if not a new world, then at ...”