“... West, ‘winning friends from all over the world’, and the Middle Kingdom, after two thousand self-regarding years, unsteadily began to look for foreign friends. In 1978 even the Class War was abandoned, but by then Mao (two years dead) had created a moral wasteland. Loyalty and compassion, where they survived, shone by contrast like the pearls which were ...”

“... not uncommon with those of unusual beauty. Still, at this time, a painting of a sinful self seemed to hang persistently on the wall of John Gray’s mind. Had he turned it over, he would have found another picture, of a portly, rosy-cheeked, golf-playing priest, with an impressive look of authority: the Father Gray (later Canon Gray) of ...”

“... The full career of Jim Henson reveals that the gulf between the traditions of fairy tale and the self-inventing styles of television culture generally thought to have supplanted them is not as wide as the disparity between the two frogs would suggest. For a start, one played the other in a film called The Frog Prince (1971). Inextricably linked with ...”

“... on progress, paralysing creative energy. It is invested with determinative force. It undermines self-confidence – for George Gilbert Scott it doomed architects to ‘capricious eclecticism’. It is the hump on the back of the cripple rather than the pack carried by the pilgrim. From wanting the past, the argument proceeds to knowing the past, and since ...”

“... or ‘inconsistency’ of his is a clue that the novel is one of those cute self-consuming artefacts. But this is unlikely. Homer sometimes nods. Wilson’s nods and becks and wreathed smiles are sometimes harder to take unseriously. In a sentence which is less exactly put than is his way, he has Severus Egg attend to ‘the stamp of his ...”

“... they are all decent men and women,” I thought, as I paid my bill at the garage; and then with self-pity added, ‘Who knows if it is any worse here than everywhere else?” ’ There are some good stories in Visitors Book. I was already familiar with Robert Bernen’s ‘Tales From the Bluestacks’, his evocations of a life spent among the sheep-farmers ...”

“... little spectacle, which has its relevance to that report and its aftermath. In an early moment of self-doubt, Marlowe’s Faustus declares: The God thou serv’st is thine own appetite, Wherein is fix’d the love of Beelzebub. However, he quickly smothers such realities with voluptuous determination: To him I’ll build an altar and a church And offer ...”

“... century’. I did not laugh at him then and do not now. Nevertheless I think he showed a lack of self-knowledge. He has proved himself to be a man of exceptional gifts, but his mind has displayed a religious rather than a scientific ...”

“... over every opinion, leaving a desolating sense that they are all equally prejudiced, naive or self-serving. Judges, barristers, liberal critics, pornographers and poets are all put in what Sutherland presumably regards as their place, though it is not at all clear where those places are. It would be ungracious of me not to mention that one exception is ...”

“... Alf me and Groge in own bed Edie Pege other Wilf in box 2 dreams. firs i saw the devel SATAN him Self: with a Spike face Alf he sade Alf i Try onlie a Small pip of er to week it hapend a gane Thes pesil is no good wobley * its all rite pece full ixep the Tee vie rubige 100 Yers the done no * wher Edie Tech to fly its esie Like Thes She holed my hand and ...”

“... and then forget them.’ He appears to have missed the arrogance of the verb ‘use’ and the self-importance of thus imposing upon thousands what was once confined to a single unfortunate correspondent. Professors, it seems, are no more impervious than anyone else to the intoxicating vanity inspired by the ‘mass media’. I suspect that Eco may have ...”

“... of psychologists. Good actors are, so far as their craft is concerned, exacting, fastidious, self-aware and very hard-working. For most of this book one is overcome by an urge to find irony where none is intended. Much of my response might well be put down to an English suspicion of the translation of a familiar process into the language of American ...”

“... pragmatist; Tymoshenko, the imprisoned former prime minister of Ukraine, is emotional, self-dramatising, glamorous, Eva Perón in peasant braids. Her supporters have taken to holding up a picture of her head growing out of a field of wheat, a version of the blue (for sky) and yellow (for fields of grain) Ukrainian flag in which Tymoshenko’s face ...”

“... from the stereotype that had become familiar – a threatening austerity relieved at times by a self-conscious cheerfulness. There seemed to loom from his talk that afternoon what were to be the qualities of his later ‘Age of’ books: a command of detail and of scope, of structure and of sweep. There were choice, past-piercing details like the one he was ...”

“... done them something of a favour. Observers with a sense of history have noted that the tabloids’ self-justification, advanced in the name of press freedom, mirrors that of the authoritarian state. The Sun columnist Jane Moore admonishes errant public figures: ‘If you don’t want your private life splashed all over the papers, then behave ...”