“... Mr Hersh offers one explanation and one only: that Kissinger was ambitious, unscrupulous and self-serving. Everything he did was to gain power for himself. If that were the whole story, Dr Kissinger would have been unmasked years ago. From time to time Mr Hersh is forced to admit that Kissinger was brilliant, that he dazzled the press corps, that he ...”

“... to return home, preferring life in an unhappy succession of old people’s homes, a kind of self-imposed exile, physically debilitated but with all his wits about him, obstinately asserting his independence to the very end. This fixity of purpose has always been evident in his work; it is equally evident in the volume on the Comintern and the Spanish ...”

“... in English usage that Mr Bryson always was entirely clear about must make him one of the most self-confident users of English of all time. The other is that it is far from obvious when one has looked at the contents of his dictionary that Mr Bryson has very good reason to believe himself entirely clear about many matters of English usage even now. But ...”

“... a former policeman who was heavily involved in the conspiracy to kill, and Pierre de Varga, a self-proclaimed aristocrat of Hungarian origins who was allegedly the instigator of the whole affair, were also given ten years; Serge Tessèdre, who was accused of recruiting the gunman, received five years, and as he had already spent that time in prison, was ...”

“... quest begins in the psychological wastes of London, where everyone he meets is trapped in arid self-satisfaction, and he himself is unable to write. ‘In London, I had gone stale and dry.’ Setting out for the renewing waters of his childhood dreams, he passes through the Minnesota State Fair (a hybrid of Vanity Fair and Langland’s ‘fair field full ...”

“... as a ‘Jones Report on the Later Roman Empire’. De Ste Croix retains, in much more explicit and self-conscious form, the same social and political commitment: ‘I am a historian who tries also to be a sociologist, and my interest in our own society is a primary one.’ This interest informs the book throughout, imparting gravity and moral energy when the ...”

“... urgent need, on the contrary, was for the state to exercise its initiative to unwind the spiral of self-reinforcing market trends. Does Keynes’s insight hold good in the 1980s? It was developed to explain the flaw at the heart of a general attempt to pile up excessive savings. It pointed to the necessary role for the state in correcting the anomalies of the ...”

“... sympathetically and reassuringly to me on my arrival had meant a great deal to me: but even their self-assurance was in large part derived from the fact that they knew they were parts of a system much larger than themselves. However, the system did have a haphazard workhouse or almshouse side to its activities whose existence I would never have suspected ...”

“... seal up his letters ‘because of the servant’. One of the results of the Renaissance habit of self-conscious re-editing of letters is that the printed correspondence of friends often seems less spontaneous than the snipings of enemies: friends had time to tidy things up. But these letters are full of delightful details, not least about the ...”

“... Calder, over the years, despite the solecism of choosing the title Recurrent Melody for the almost self-explanatory Passacaille (published in French in 1969 and translated in 1975). In the recent past, however, the pace of Pinget translations seems to have been hotted up by an enterprising small press in New York, Red Dust, who have not only reinstated the ...”

“... contrasts in mood between each – all these were evidence of a high degree of professionalism and self-assurance. However, there was a striking contrast between the music and the words: not only because the music was so accomplished and the words were often so inept (sometimes to the point of nonsensicality), but because the music was melancholy and intimate ...”

“... history as drama, very often tragedy. His tribute to Raleigh, rising as a poet above his pettier self and that of his age, is discerning. He has a frequently compelling turn of phrase. ‘Ireland, of course, is irony’s chosen country,’ he remarks on the oddity of Burke, emotional and romantic, coming to be venerated as founder of modern ...”

“... a saga of the national emergence of America, synchronised to ride on the 1976 wave of bicentennial self-satisfaction. But as Leon Uris, another practitioner in the field, has pointed out, the American ‘birth of a nation’ formula can be transplanted anywhere in the world. Hence, in Uris’s case, Exodus (Israel) and Trinity (Ireland). Trinity, which made ...”

“... the state was supposed to embody was deeply entrenched; and it was further reinforced in this self-image by Franco, with his persistent references to the Armed Forces as the guardians of the nation against its enemies, which, after the defeat of the Axis, seemed to be just about the entire Western world. Franco eventually passed himself off as an enemy of ...”

“... above a certain quiet tone, which after a while becomes a little predictable and unexciting: never self-conscious and always splendidly in tune with itself, it finally seems too modest, and one wishes that Bowles could have had the nerve to weld his understanding of these people and his fluency with their folktale motifs into a Midnight’s Children of ...”