“... 1960s, Kim Il Sung instituted big changes, redirecting the state ideology towards nationalism and self-reliance and provoking sharp clashes with Moscow – enough to make Alexei Kosygin and Yuri Andropov come running to Pyongyang, where Kim essentially told them to go to hell. Whatever North Korea has been since then, it hasn’t been Stalinist. Stalin’s ...”

“... of resident reviewers in contemporary broadsheets – superficiality, over-confident judgments, self-importance, puffing – and Wilson was not as exempt from these as it might please us to think. Nonetheless, this platform made him a person of consequence in literary New York. Though scarcely more than thirty, he was already being teasingly referred to as ...”

“... as time went on the atmosphere became almost strained, though with Willie his usual smiling vague self. At the finish the madame was insistent that we should not all leave together so we separately filtered out into an empty Bond Street with me wondering if this at last was ‘living’. 7 July. It’s perhaps the quality of my acquaintance but I have yet to ...”

“... four decades. His lectures on Volume I of Capital, available online, have become part of the self-education of many young leftists, and now supply the framework for his useful Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’. (I sat in on his lectures at the City University of New York in the fall of 2007; a good Marxist, Harvey made no effort to find out whether any ...”

“... but once back home, he writes to his friend Thomas McGreevy dismissing the problem with much self-conscious wordplay, going on to reflect at length on poetry and painting. One of the high points of the first volume is an unusually candid letter to McGreevy in 1935 in which Beckett, now in Jungian analysis in London, acknowledges a possible psychosomatic ...”

“... loomed over city squares. The Dutch, unlike the British in India, had inflicted few obviously self-aggrandising monuments on the country they exploited. Squatters now lived in the decaying colonial district of Kota in Jakarta where the Dutch had once created a replica of home, complete with mansions, canals and cobbled squares. By the time I visited, the ...”

“... claim that human history was already unified by the successive modes of production.) As for the self-referential quality of so much postmodern culture – language about language, images of images – this confirmed rather than contradicted the intimate relationship of culture to the heavy machinery of material production. The ...”

“... edge of the third fairway hanging dead from a tree. The tone in Cheever’s journals was usually self-pitying and humourless. In the stories, however, he could turn domestic despair into comedy and then back again, often in a single phrase. Neddy in ‘The Swimmer’, for example, Cheever wrote, ‘might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly ...”

“... review of her dancing partner’s character – ‘not respected … resented … rude and too self-regarding’. Nureyev’s sister, Rosa, and best friend, Tamara Zakrzhevskaya, tried to see what was going on through a slightly open door, until someone saw them and ‘kicked’ the door closed. Rosa had already provided a statement about Rudolf’s ...”

“... gesture even, and the honour of the Italian male impugned. The wound I have received is virtually self-inflicted, an entirely proper response to an insult to Italian manhood for which a blow on the skull with a length of steel scaffolding is perfectly appropriate. We had been cruising; it was our own fault. That there was no truth in this assumption I ...”

“... Gustaf Kossinna, the human cultures which mattered were not interpenetrating but autochthonous, self-creating. They did not derive from the impact of, or mixture with, other cultures (invaders, migrants, intermarriage across ethnic boundaries), but arose and developed as the consequences of innate biological forces in their own ‘blood’ or gene-pool. A ...”

“... dominant rhetoric, Grossman presents us with a nation that appears – from its violent, stubborn, self-defeating behaviour – to be hell-bent on destroying itself. No nation, no democracy can live without illusions. If Grossman is right in the link he makes between the state’s ills and those of its children, it is to Israel’s youth – its pride – that ...”

“... through a lorgnette.’ The actors suffered from ‘professional jealousy’, he noted, more than self-pity. ‘Not one of them had a good word to say for the other.’ The backbiting was, it seemed, infectious – since Browning joined the bad-mouthing. He told the Los Angeles Times that he could never tell what his freaks might do. ‘Most of them are ...”

“... of Bellow’s girlfriends must have made him dizzy), his manner and approach are modest and self-effacing; his personal piques and objections to Bellow’s personal and professional misdemeanours are mostly kept in a diplomatic pouch, in marked contrast to Atlas’s snorty exasperations. He endeavours to be judiciously fair. But although Leader has ...”

“... second sense. Morgan begins with what she calls ‘arguments about exclusion before the 1960s’. Self-styled Anglo-Saxon New England gentlemen researching their heroic freedom-loving ancestors, using a narrow range of hard-to-find and closely held records, were followed by more sociologically diverse white ethnic groups whose members formed their own descent ...”