“... meant frustratingly brief contact with Iraqi civilians. The Pentagon made little secret of its self-serving motives for inviting us to take part in the biggest deployment of journalists alongside soldiers since World War Two. There was no reason for the generals to expect journalists to glorify the war (although some officers did seem to envisage ...”

“... Panic (fuelled by greed), injustice, bureaucratic harshness, maddening absurdity, alienation and self-estrangement – all this, but not, in the end, mass murder based on an official racial ideology. The lynching of the farmer in Bad Day at Black Rock was not repeated on a national scale. Otsuka is at her best when such considerations don’t weigh on the ...”

“... also suffered the worst of the economic sanctions. Where Kurdish infant mortality declined under self-rule, theirs rose tenfold or more under Saddam. And the blame for sanctions fell on the United States for compelling the United Nations to renew them each year. Whenever Saddam pops up on Iraqi television to show his people that the US has failed once again ...”

“... have read In the Blue Light of African Dreams. So why does Watkins bother with these forays into self-referential territory? The answer would seem to have something to do with the subject of forgery, of producing an invented artefact that looks like a genuine one. Watkins appears to be fascinated with the way fictional worlds can be made to resemble the real ...”

“... needs to make a phone-call. He also involves himself as sketchily as possible in ITV’s incessant self-promotion. Most of the ‘only on this channel’ stridency is handled by captions and voice-overs. One of the great BBC Lynam moments in the 1998 World Cup came just before the England v. Tunisia match – an afternoon fixture and unshiftable. There was ...”

“... never heard of’. She has adapted only too well. Nicknamed ‘Twinkle’, she is so self-assured and boisterous that one ought to hate her; but Lahiri conveys her irresistible charm with such skill that one doesn’t. Not many writers are good at conveying charm (as opposed to its effect on other characters). Tolstoy did with Natasha in War and ...”

“... the reader. (After he has ribbed authors who rely on ‘arrogance, bullying, puffery, rapacity, self-awe and the tipping of winks’ in order to get on, he makes a confession: ‘In the end I believe it’s better simply to be honest and to try to be explicit. And if you can’t be, you should at least try and pretend.’) The backward-looking shopkeepers ...”

“... seedy World’s Fair Hotel in the suburb of Englewood, close by the entrance to Jackson Park. A self-trained pharmacist, Holmes tickled credit out of tradesmen as readily as he charmed lonely women into serial bigamy. He had already built his Englewood building when the World’s Fair was announced. He promptly converted it into a hotel and installed a ...”

“... as a kind of nod or wink or coded sexual hint. ‘Almost everything in his letter to Symonds is a self-revelation: the love of Italy; the small number of people, the exchanged look, the "victims of a common passion", and that key word "unspeakably", attached to "tender".’ Robb has not spotted an engaging characteristic of James’s, which one often comes ...”

“... From the standard perspective which holds that economic agency is based on the rational pursuit of self-interest, the inconsistency of this stance is obvious: populist conservatives are literally voting themselves into economic ruin. Less taxation and increased deregulation means more freedom for the corporations that are driving impoverished farmers out of ...”

“... with the predictable and much-predicted consequence that it pleased nobody else. Its long orgy of self-indulgence began immediately after the 1997 election, when the Parliamentary Party rejected Kenneth Clarke as its next leader. Clarke was unquestionably the best of the candidates and indeed the only one who was unquestionably qualified for the job. Yet ...”

“... Grote has what the 18th century called bottom; and today, in an age when showmanship and self-advertisement may seem necessary to the historian as public intellectual, it is a quality especially to be ...”

“... unreliable third-person voice; and the narration is such a garble of mismatched registers, self-contradictions and pointless circumlocutions that it adds yet another layer of unreality to something which has little concern with verisimilitude in the first place. Ordinary words and phrases frequently appear in quotes – ‘“pop” or ...”

“... they are supposed to be. The problem is that Colin Farrell, as Crockett, is not up to this kind of self-parody, and Jamie Foxx, as Tubbs, who probably is up to it, doesn’t get a chance to try. The movie has done some odd things to the two main characters of the series. Johnson had a touch of sleaze and defeat about him which it would be hard to ...”

“... and gives it its strange mind, so to speak. Even when he seems to slip back into his old acting self, the effect is different. As Frank Costello, head of the Irish syndicate in Boston, is speaking of a rat who has infiltrated his organisation, he suddenly makes a cartoonish rat face, all teeth and sniffing nose. A little later, in a grotesque spoof of the ...”