“... began buying and selling rare books and fine editions, and made plans to become a publisher. To be self-taught in a country as stiflingly curricular as France was up to a point a blessing: Malraux read more freely and thought more expansively than he might have done had he stayed on at school. Expansiveness can go too far, however, and with Malraux it ...”

“... knocking off early, acts of petty theft and sabotage – became paradigmatic examples of the ‘self-valorisation’ of the working class. At first, these actions were part of a strategy for effecting revolutionary change, not (as in anarchism) an attempt to realise a new social ideal. But they soon became ends in themselves, and throughout the 1980s ...”

“... spent in Bangalore immersed in Gibbon and Macaulay formed his mind and shaped his style; the self-promoting war journalism made his name, boosted his bank balance and launched him into Parliament. Rather surprisingly for a leading military historian, Keegan does not really develop the martial theme he sets out so vividly early on. Yet it mattered ...”

“... rigid and abnormally fussy’. She displays throughout ‘a powerful ego’: ‘Deeper than self-doubt was certainty of the importance of her self.’ But Wharton’s egotism and sense of her own importance were entirely justified. Mainwaring finds it hard to lift her head from the engrossing details of her quest to ...”

“... in the potion was amphetamine – speed. But to get things exactly right Williams’s daily self-medication before addressing the typewriter required one final element: cranked up to racing mode with speed, he backed down the rpms before starting to work by making himself a Martini. He told Kazan it was a double Martini. When a man makes himself a ...”

“... that the UK should do the same, to ‘avoid becoming like Greece’, was treated as if it was self-evident. What about the problem that austerity would make the recession worse? Supporters of austerity put forward two counter-arguments. First, the prospect of a rising government deficit would worry consumers and firms so much that they would spend less as ...”

“... 1930s. And the situation was deteriorating in the United States. In the 1960s conservatives and self-described liberals were clamping down, radicals were dropping out and social scientists were becoming more rigid. The Hirschmans’ friends at Harvard were moving to extremes. Adelman describes the long moment well. Hirschman was dismayed and confused. He ...”

“... States, the times when I had been someone else’s Leonard Bast. The comparison is both acute and self-refuting – a Nigerian who has read Howards End will never be in the same shoes as the one who reminds him of Leonard Bast. Forster’s struggle not to condescend to his character is reproduced almost too faithfully in the way Cole deploys the allusion. The ...”

“... There is the same feeling, in the statement to Murry, of the mental engine turning – abstractly self-tormenting – with the same preoccupation, and the same circularity, that would surface in the Sweeney poems: Any man has to, needs to, wants to Once in a lifetime, do a girl in … He didn’t know if he was alive and the girl was dead He didn’t know if ...”

“... conception of himself’. The unsettling thing about Gatsby was that he proved to have a self-image unalterable by defeat. Since his party was badly beaten in the mid-term election on 2 November, Obama has hinted that he may allow the 2001 Bush tax cuts for the richest 1 per cent to be continued: the very thing which before the election he said he ...”

“... how much that excited him, and how he struggled, though willingly, to keep up with the pace of self-liberation set by Wollstonecraft. The two met in 1791, at a dinner for Thomas Paine, where they quarrelled; four and a half years later, boldly, brazenly even, Wollstonecraft called uninvited on Godwin, and their affair began. Godwin even wrote her a love ...”

“... Speaker after speaker had begun to attack them by name. Wang was even forced to present a ‘self-criticism’ acknowledging his past political sins. When Deng showed up, there was little left to say. He was offered the party’s leading position on the spot, and knowing full well what had transpired in his absence, he took it. We know less about what ...”

“... weak chest finally undid him at the age of 51. Instead, Frank Prochaska has stitched together this self-portrait out of the boxfuls of essays, letters and articles he did leave. These have been republished in multi-volume editions three times, by Forrest Morgan in 1889, by one of the Wilson sisters, Emilie Barrington, in 1915, and finally by Norman St John ...”

“... chattering classes of ‘a crisis in French cooking’ hasn’t helped either – if not a self-fulfilling prophecy, it perhaps accelerates the ‘decline’ it purports to describe. The kind of food that is indeed ‘worth the trip’ is caught up in the perception of who’s winning and who’s losing in the fine dining race. (I can get from Boston ...”

“... a groundswell but more than a splinter-group.) There have been violent exceptions to the rule of self-restraint. On 18 February a wild man who hated taxes flew a single-engine plane into a federal building in Austin, Texas; a group of Tea Partiers mobbed the Democrats on the Capitol steps after the healthcare vote and shouted epithets at the lawmakers; and ...”