“... libel cases and the older methods of telephoned menaces and close news management by the Kremlin. Self-censorship returned. As one media-watcher told Jack, ‘we thought that the guard inside each journalist’s head had left his post and gone away. Now we have found out that he was just asleep and is waking up.’ The rest of the world is increasingly unsure ...”

“... are such a shrewdly calculated mix of outrageousness and buffoonery, of bullying, histrionics and self-parody, that they almost invariably succeed in setting the reader aquiver; normally, at this safe distance in time, with laughter, but at other moments with an uneasy dismay at the urge to destroy they serio-comically encourage and ...”

“... paradises are the paradises one has lost.’ The wording of Patterson and Prendergast is clear and self-contained, makes sense on its own. Scott Moncrieff sounds oracular rather than aphoristic; we shan’t know what his words mean until we have worked on them. There is nothing wrong with any of these versions, and there is no court of appeal in the French ...”

“... ones.’ All this combined to push Brown towards destructive behaviour and later, possibly, self-harm. Of the younger Brown, ‘pugilistic and cruel’ when drunk, one female acquaintance recalled: ‘had George died then . . . he would simply have been remembered as the local soak.’ In fact, Brown’s problems provided him with time and space to ...”

“... obvious that she had energies just waiting for Suzanne, let alone the propensity for mocking self-awareness . . . Irony had never seemed Ryan’s forte. For Ryan, To Die For was just another might-have-been. Not taking the part didn’t bring her down immediately; she went on to star as a faintly absurd war hero in Courage under Fire, which ...”

“... traditional form, at least in Europe, they are mostly free from the temptations of agitprop and self-justifying polemic, though not of the acid of academic controversy. They probably constitute the rare phenomenon of an obituary literature written from the grave. British studies in this field are particularly well developed, thanks to the numerous published ...”

“... one recognises this can one understand why, throughout weeks of protest, people displayed so much self-discipline. This did not come from a fear of government revenge, but from a strong feeling of pride in their ability to take their fate into their own hands – visibly a legacy of the Chinese revolution and a socialist past. The crime rate in Beijing fell ...”

“... happen if their certainties were abandoned, desperately struggling to maintain their sense of self, afraid of each other’s contempt, they staggered from idealism to self-destruction.There was an enormous cultural response to the suicides. The following year, the film Germany in Autumn was made, with contributions ...”

“... clutches of a strong Zionist lobby: in fact the American-Israeli relationship is based on mutual self-interest, as perceived by both countries’ rulers. In his memoir, My Mission in Israel, 1948-51, America’s first Ambassador, James McDonald, quotes the rationale for US support of Israel that a ‘high Israeli official’ proposed to the Embassy in ...”

“... exoticism was going forever to refute his understanding of them. In practice, indeed, he struck a self-conscious balance between what he did and didn’t understand as a traveller, or, in the terms which he favoured, between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’: the creative play between the two, once the Exote is in situ, is simply a local transposition of ...”

“... June 1941 – indeed he comes close to dismissing the apparent suicide bid in 1940 as a piece of self-dramatisation. Finally, if Moulin was a secret Communist his Resistance activity could be explained in terms of division and conspiracy rather than unity and integrity. To complicate matters, Marnham hints that he was perhaps betrayed by a Communist, even ...”

“... should also carry out their own research, something commercial fund managers too often leave to self-interested investment banks and finance houses. The proposed network of pension boards, with their own staff and specialists, would be accountable to local constituencies but independent of central government. As the Swedish LO discovered, such an approach ...”

“... Lloyd’s successive chapters cover, in similar fashion, the pageant of debates about space, the self, agency and causation, health and classifications of plants and animals, as well as others that I have already mentioned. His seventh chapter introduces a worry about all these inquiries. Does the dichotomy between nature and nurture, or, as he ...”

“... leave floating. Lisbon and Portugal imply or at least mirror the lives of (some of) their rich and self-indulgent citizens. Or is it the other way round? Either way a claim to explanation seems to be going too far, as it no doubt already was in Balzac. Balzac is named several times in The Maias. Two characters are said to have a ‘Balzacian eye’, and Balzac ...”

“... all but the last act of The Cocktail Party. Perhaps Coward’s lack of formal education made him self-conscious among intellectuals. He actively hid any hint of his own erudition from the public, despite the fact that he admired Ulysses, went regularly to Stravinsky’s ballets and quoted Shakespeare and Keats. He was also a talented linguist. There was more ...”