“... memoirs, but no less rigorous, and in some respects probably even more so, since the diaries were self-censored within a Stalinist frame of reference, while the memoirs emerged in the milder climate of the Thaw. Gorodetsky compares Maisky’s diaries to Pepys’s in their ‘astute observation of the British political and social scene, spiced with anecdotes ...”

“... spoilt beyond redemption. The second son, the Duke of York who became the reluctant king, was the self-effacing naval officer hampered by an acute stammer. Of the younger two, Gloucester was a solid military man and Kent another playboy. More promiscuous than his elder brother, he was the good time who was had by all, including, it was said, Noël Coward and ...”

“... contrast, ‘the spirit presiding over the internet is that of an economy of abundance, where the self must choose and maximise its options and is forced to use techniques of cost-benefit and efficiency.’ At first it was exciting but after a couple of months the cracks began to show. What Beauman says about our inability to gauge what might be attractive ...”

“... began to relax and enjoy the Nazi regime’s early achievements and the return of national self-confidence. Friends edged away, although Johannes kept in touch with the political victims and Jews in his old circle. (He used to say that his educated Jewish friends were ‘the last Prussians’: ...”

“... called in the Roman army’s Vindolanda tablets – suffered a total collapse of cultural self-confidence in the post-Roman era, especially in the most Romanised and so least self-sufficient areas, and that they may have been ready to accept the language and lifestyle of their new competitors. Something like that ...”

“... on her and waiting for her. What was I waiting for? Waiting for her to step into her self or step out of her invalid self. Waiting for her to take the voyage out of her gloom.’ Something needs to change. Hot Milk takes its epigraph from Cixous: ‘It’s up to you to break the old circuits.’ For Sofia, that ...”

“... come quickly to the conclusion that Guha is indeed an Indian nationalist, though a moderate and self-critical one. He is also a self-defined ‘liberal’, a word that has no real resonance in Indian politics today, but which is meant to suggest a distance from both Marxist historiography and the ideology of the ...”

“... which folly, that child of absolute power, rules events; in other words, a world in which a fatal self-delusion that is both comic and tragic is always with us. Cavafy’s ‘canon’ comprises 154 poems. These two new books – Sachperoglou’s Collected Poems and Haviaras’s The Canon – translate each and every poem. Some thirty unfinished ...”

“... conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of self-importance,’ and who, moreover, ‘hate foreigners, especially if they come from “inferior” races’. The sociological precision of the snobbish anathema is unique neither to Trevor-Roper nor to the patrician soft right; but it is characteristic of his ...”

“... to have attempted. His earlier writing saw literature and power as locked in reciprocal cycles of self-construction and self-destruction, in which individuals mattered far less than ideological processes. But then he always gave Shakespeare a special place in these processes, and the circulations of power which he found ...”

“... epic. ‘He is “Old Ez” in the stockade; the sufferer “au bout de toutes mes forces”; the self-critic who has been “hard as youth sixty years”.’ For some reason, Read was particularly touched by what he saw as Pound’s change of heart towards Winston Churchill. The Pisan stockade remained on active service in literary criticism for rather ...”

“... abstraction did not break with the artistic past but preserved its greatest qualities through self-critique. Such ‘Modernist painting’ served, then, not only to bracket other avant-garde practices, which indeed posited a break with tradition (the readymade, constructed sculpture, the found image, collage, photomontage), but also to paper over ...”

“... enthusiastically endorsing the attacks. Even then they looked petulant; now it is clear they were self-defeating. All they did was turn Bin Laden into a household name throughout the region, if not the world, and recruit thousands to his cause – itself very different from what the Americans believe it to be. The attack undermined the emerging moderate ...”

“... of international law currently circulate. One sees the limits of state obligation as drawn by self-interest: they’re taken to encompass a limited degree of altruism by citizens towards their compatriots, but not to extend as far as the woaded inhabitants of ‘bongo-bongo land’, or even the members of the next Neighbourhood Watch. The other view takes ...”

“... undoubted ‘pluck’, not courage, which he never had, but an unquestioning belief in his own bad self, whatever it was up to. The greatest irony is that had he been allowed to take the stand at one of the Wilde trials, he would probably not have pretended Greek love was all about education and holding hands – which was why Oscar’s friends kept him away ...”