“... if the Standard had allowed its financial independence to be corrupted, it never permitted its self-respect to be wholly disregarded. There can be no denying, though, that the Standard has had a chequered history, that even its glory days were not that glorious. Politically, it was on the wrong side on virtually everything: vehemently opposed to Catholic ...”

“... to London in her husband’s clothes, she follows him, abandoning husband, child and her normal self. From this, various horrors ensue, none of them entirely unpredictable but all of them shocking, which is as it should be in a novel about the pathos of predictability. The narrator’s faintly camp confidence is set against the horror of events; the ...”

“... the Thai nor the Pakistani Government is anxious to alienate its border tribes. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: drug-crop profits are used to bribe officials and to purchase arms, which brings increased independence, which allows still more opium poppies to be grown. Mills fingers a number of very high-up Thai and Panamanian government figures who ...”

“... are out to get you – they being a cabal comprising the Government and the medical establishment (self-appointed ‘guardians of public morality’) which is both powerful and evil. There is, of course, nothing new in radicals – or reactionaries, for that matter – spotting conspiracies where others see epidemics: no less a man of the people than William ...”

“... he emerges more or less unscathed, with the proposal that to be conscious – in the sense of self-aware – a computing machine must have an operating system that incorporates a model of itself. One would scarcely expect a firm answer to the question whether the possession of such an operating system would necessarily confer consciousness on the ...”

“... for all of us’; and made him out to be somewhat like the ‘Saint’ in his tireless acts of self-effacing goodness on behalf of the community, noble but expressionless in the manner of Roger Moore. ‘He let loose a barrage of bullets that would be heard around the world’: Rubin quotes Emerson on the shot that opened the American War of ...”

“... and civilise reach a satisfying climax. He is, and seems always to have been, almost totally self-absorbed (few autobiographers can have evinced so little interest in their wives and children), a law-giver never in doubt about his mission. He ends his book surveying his handiwork, gazing up at the sixty-foot trees he planted twenty-five years ago, and ...”

“... had more than a little of the flavour of breakfast with the Borgias. The Federation was run by a self-appointing oligarchy of the large firms using a voting system reminiscent of the Teamsters. David Morrell became one of the awkward squad with his Quixotic notion that construction companies should put in real tenders, related to what the jobs would ...”

“... Macmillan described its attitude as a ‘fragile and insubstantial screen of complacency and self-deception, skilfully designed to delude a whole people into a fictitious sense of security’. Plus ça change. In fact public opinion was displaying not only a troubled volatility but also what we now regard as the start of a decisive swing against Munich ...”

“... the play of ideas beneath the bland words, in the overall notion of the piece, in the sentences’ self-consciousness about the act of writing itself. These writers are like art students from Goldsmiths’: never mind the finish, feel the concept. Thus the first page of this first novel reads: Florida was the largest producer of tangerines in the ...”

“... was the ‘gardenesque’, and his rhetorical style, very much in the mode of Leigh Hunt, promoted self-advancement through the cultivation of a miniature estate which might ensure to humbler folk ‘everything that is worth having of the enjoyments of the wealthier classes’. The background of Keats’s Odes is the villa garden, which could include Grecian ...”

“... word for ‘home’ (it is one of the words concentrated into the acronym Gestapo). She discusses self-deception, confession, professional confidentiality, police and journalistic investigations. She has some notable horror stories. There was the Holy Vehm, a secret vigilante organisation which was founded in mid-13th-century Westphalia and lasted until ...”

“... to the book with benevolence and admiration. Kingsley Amis has admitted – with only a measure of self-parody – that he doesn’t want to read any more books that don’t begin: ‘A shot rang out.’ Richard Cobb’s second volume of autobiography, nominally about Shrewsbury and Oxford, opens with a man getting off the boat train at the Gare Saint-Lazare ...”

“... a cheery, well-adjusted trio, but there is, it must be said, something a bit dubious in Perry’s self-profile: he is ‘a psychologist (licensed in Vermont), a sexologist (certified by the American College of Sexologists) and a biofeed-back practioner (certified by the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America)’. He is also an ordained, if not ...”

“... scheme of all was undertaken by the Earl of Bedford, one of the leaders of the political group self-consciously opposed to other royal policies. Thus the tension appears to have arisen not from a division between court and country but from prejudices entertained against Fenlanders by the rest of English society. It might be added that Fenland drainage had ...”