“... that kind of money to live in a two-bedroom flat in Vauxhall. The target market is glaringly, self-evidently non-local.This is happening in a city where, by universal consent, one of the biggest problems is the lack of affordable housing. For many Londoners, younger people especially, the cost of housing is their first concern; living in what the Joseph ...”

“... federal project’: a United States of Europe. The book is part Federalist Papers, part self-serving memoir. It will confirm in their prejudices all of those who have a certain idea of ‘the Brussels-based elite’. Verhofstadt trumpets his ‘decades in service to the European peoples’. He also reveals some of his private passions in order to ...”

“... the society around them.Personal Crisis – Family tensions; sense of isolation; adolescence; low self-esteem; disassociating from existing friendship group and becoming involved with a new and different group of friends; searching for answers to questions about identity, faith and belonging.Personal Circumstances – Migration; local community ...”

“... very white bra’. Jilly Cooper has an eye for Thatcher’s likeable side and for her disciplined self-denial and she doesn’t let either quite win out. These 1970s Sunday Times columns, based increasingly on her own rollicking domestic life by Putney Common, are full of ideas and entertaining anecdotes, many of which provide material for the later ...”

“... be heartfelt. But if Lake is right it follows that the earl’s indignation is either simulated or self-deceiving. That does not mean the scene must be played that way, for it is a defining feature of Shakespeare’s art that his characterisations will sustain any number of interpretations in performance. But Lake’s point may indicate how it would have been ...”

“... to dismiss Mayakovsky’s early political commitment as naive idealism, and later in his life as a self-destructive effort to conform. His political poems – about a third of his output – are rarely translated and considered hackery. Rosy Carrick’s new selection of his work, Volodya, doesn’t go along with this reading. In her introduction Carrick argues ...”

“... is China Miéville, best known as a science fiction man of leftist sympathies whose fiction is self-described as ‘weird’. Miéville is not a historian, though he has done his homework, and his October is not at all weird, but elegantly constructed and unexpectedly moving. What he sets out to do, and admirably succeeds in doing, is to write an exciting ...”

“... will endow them with that which is beyond all human science and reveal to them God’s very self.’ To that end she unilaterally hired a professor of personal ethics, Reverend Hepworth, who preached that ‘the departed are nearer to us, very much nearer than we dare think.’ The Darwinian ichthyologist was not happy with any of this, but he kept his ...”

“... mini-dynasties of similar eminence. The bloodline is as vital as the Windsors’. A bereavement of self-knowledge is also useful. They are hardly aware of their ephemerality till everything turns to dust. That’s a relief the Firm can’t share – even in Californian exile they will never escape the fate they were born to. Dramatic irony is the common humour ...”

“... biracial democracy that followed the Civil War – was a time of misgovernment and corruption; the self-styled Redeemers, who rescued the South from the supposed horrors of ‘Negro rule’ by overthrowing Reconstruction, were the inheritors of the values of the Old South; a New South was emerging and with it the promise of widespread prosperity. This dogma ...”

“... but instead to guarantee the most stable currency values for international investors. Numerous self-imposed fiscal ‘rules’ and ‘pacts’ were introduced by governments during this period, all aimed at reassuring the financial markets that politicians remained conscious they were under supervision.In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of ...”

“... settles in with her husband, Pran, a shopkeeper, only to discover that he is caught in a web of self-serving lies and deceptions, along with his parents, the extended family and what seems at times to be the entire Asian merchant culture. The novel raises many questions about the standard depiction of Ugandan Asians as victims of theft, rape, violence ...”

“... the recorded confession in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity). There’s also a nod to Camus’s self-confessing narrator in The Fall. In the context of the French crime novel, however, it appeared wildly original. Instead of sub-Maigret detectives propping up an unchanging social order, Manchette attacks de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic for its secret violence ...”

“... to become the signing automaton of constitutional theory after his accession, Edward kept his self-respect by inverting the relative weight of political realities and their kingly representation. In his hawkish policing of the honours system and the details of court dress, Edward felt himself to be working hard. George, by virtue of being uxorious rather ...”

“... for the Burger King of Palm Beach, Giuliani would relinquish all shame, honour, dignity, self-respect and semblance of continence. According to Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, he stank up the bathroom on one of Trump’s campaign planes so badly that Trump bellowed, ‘Rudy! That’s fucking ...”