“... UK support Saudi Arabia would no longer be able to prosecute its war. MBS will be hoping that the self-interest of the British government and British arms manufacturers – helped along by Saudi-funded lobbying and soothing noises from his supporters in the press – will continue to trump all legal arguments. The other event, of course, was the killing of ...”

“... of plagues since the Middle Ages.Johnson’s insouciance goes hand in hand with his gargantuan self-confidence. So it’s not surprising that his reaction to these embarrassments has been to double down. Instead of standing back and letting better-qualified people make the decisions, Superman proposes, according to the Daily Telegraph of 3 June, to ‘take ...”

“... held good for the next two hundred years, was with a recent invention in a different field. Any self-respecting 18th-century encyclopedia of the arts and sciences contains an entry along the lines of this one from John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum: ‘MICROPHONES are Instruments contrived to magnifie small Sounds, as Microscopes do small ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... business district; Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902), which proposed verdant, self-contained new towns to accommodate what would later be called ‘overspill’ from the metropolis; and the City Beautiful Movement, which seized American planners in the early 1900s with its vision of grand, vaguely Parisian classical ensembles – usually ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Nonconformism and a much more radical local proletariat. They demanded incorporation – municipal self-government – and electoral reform. The pact broke down in the Bull Ring riots of 1839, when shopkeepers and factory owners supported the violent suppression of Chartist demonstrations by the Metropolitan Police, bussed in for the occasion. For the next ...”

“... he knew, by his decision to turn his back on the spectacle. It is the severity of Turgenev’s self-judgment, and the sincerity of his self-exposure, that allows him to personify and at the same time to assert societal guilt.Turgenev was then 51. He was the son of a tyrant. His mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to read a piece against Rushdie that does not contain such a disclaimer), before lapsing into self-pity: ‘I do not expect many to listen to arguments like mine. The colonial prejudices are still too ingrained.’ There has long been a Berger scale for fatuity, but that piece, even in the judgment of seasoned seismographers, went clear off the graph. Was ...”

“... he stopped thinking of the universe as somehow ‘spiritual’ in character, as Great Evolving Self. Instead, he started thinking of human selves and human languages as just devices which evolution had recently cobbled together. More important, he stopped thinking of the universe as having an intrinsic nature, as something which one might get right once ...”

“... was crucial. This verbal habit of the King’s was presumably the attempt of a nervous and self-conscious man to prevent the conversation from flagging – always a danger in chats with the monarch since the subject is never certain whether he or she is expected to reply or when. The onset of the King’s mania delivered him from ...”