“... All three men cast disabused eyes over the ruthless spy chiefs, priggish civil servants and self-seeking diplomats who notice such things about them. And from the ‘calves-foot jelly’, ‘essence of beef’ and ‘breast of chicken from the jar’ fed to the convalescing Leamas to the ‘glass-fronted sentry box with a “Scenes of ...”

“... be stretched to encompass an unwavering air of innocence, combined with an evident capacity for self-delusion and, when it suited him, ruthlessness. Naivety is neither good nor bad in itself, and many famous politicians have had their share of it. But unless Blair, far from being the regular guy as which he likes to project himself, is a hypocrite of ...”

“... but might he have meant more? Could this apparent misfit be understood in the context of his self-consciously ‘civilised’ age? The Highly Civilised Man treats Burton as an authentic product of his times rather than a flamboyant exception to them. The result is a clever intellectual history, structured around the chief guises ...”

“... the fatal doctor thinks, his love only imperfectly distinguishable from pity or his pity from self-pity. He has somehow mislaid everything in his life that matters to him – mislaid or rejected or destroyed, incapable of receiving what he most requires. The boundaries of his being have failed. His life is not his life; he himself has no life; he is ...”

“... Its members are ruthless; they have remarkable organisational skills, a tremendous capacity for self-sacrifice and self-discipline, and a deep hatred of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a ...”

“... his best roles, the doomed Jeff Bailey in the 1947 film Out of the Past: ‘Mitchum is so sleepily self-confident with the women that when he slopes into clinches you expect him to snore in their faces . . . his curious languor suggests Bing Crosby supersaturated on barbiturates.’ The following year Mitchum would be arrested for possession of marijuana and ...”

“... he was past that – but I did know that she was in every way inappropriate, that he was being self-pitying with someone to whom he ought, in my view, not to have revealed himself. He was being abject: not in, or with, his body as Freud dreamed of his father, but emotionally. I am not talking about my father in dreams – he almost never appears there ...”

“... own interests before the public good, and to follow the evil advice of those corrupt and equally self-interested counsellors who seduced him along that road. These were the issues traversed in the copious ‘Mirror of Princes’ literature, to which Erasmus made the most famous contribution. Under the youthful Henry, all seemed set fair. Thomas More extolled ...”

“... produces idiocy, in the original sense of the word – confinement within the self, loss of contact with the real world and an inability to subscribe to a shared meaning. Lacking a common reference point, their only reference is to themselves and they are no longer capable of relating the world ‘out there’ to their representation of ...”

“... quality of SOP – Standard Operating Procedure. The other is its tendency continuously and self-consciously to produce itself, in the Hollywood sense of the word. Aim and action are not sufficient. Tasks must be dramatised. A plot has to be storyboarded. Dialogue has to be written in advance. Roles must be imagined, then cast. It was Moazzam Begg’s ...”

“... about the Holocaust and the camps. On the very first page we meet in Gyuri an observant, detached, self-obsessed boy who notices all details with crystal precision, and yet has no interest in the motives of other people, or in the background to what is taking place, unless they impact on his own hour-to-hour life. ‘I didn’t go to school today,’ the novel ...”

“... nostalgic, ruralist conservatives. As Blackbourn relates, dam-building became a focus of German self-congratulation in the 1890s and the early 20th century. The Urft, Eder and Möhne dams were built before 1914, to vast popular enthusiasm. ‘Dam tourism’ developed, and a genre of ‘dam journalism’ offered ‘articles through which the vocabulary of ...”

“... did the epic history of the raids never get written? Sebald suspects a process of ‘pre-conscious self-censorship: a way of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms’. The ‘now legendary and in some respects genuinely admirable’ reconstruction prevented any backward view. There was a silent agreement, equally binding on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a realist and a determined unrealist that he could seemingly invent a strange Christian sect of self-mutilated castrates and a cannibal who takes along a green companion on his journey lest he run short of food along the way, and then reveal in an afterword that such practices were well documented in the Russia of the time – which is rather like finding a ...”