“... and the collapse of state industry – struck back and returned Poland to government by self-pitying ‘super-patriots’. But the idea of the Gdańsk museum had been conceived in the hopeful years. And it was a noble idea. Almost all war museums are ‘national’. They show relics of ‘our’ war, with enough reference to the experience of other ...”

“... guessing statisticians will also tell us that (c) you’re more likely to die from a self-inflicted knife wound than a shark attack.) If you are dragged under, you are supposed to get aggressive rather than play dead: sharks’ extraordinary sensitivity to electromagnetic fields means that they can detect the heartbeats even of immobile ...”

“... the Clock, but by my Chair; for when that informs me my Pound of Food is exhausted I conclude my self to be hungry, and lay in another with all Diligence. In my Days of Abstinence I lose a Pound and an half, and on solemn Fasts am two Pounds lighter than on other Days in the Year.’ Weighing yourself to assuage your fears was one thing; gambling on your ...”

“... with urbanism and modernity’, and produced instead reactionary kitsch. If Renoir’s sin was his self-indulgence, it wasn’t a lapse: he pursued it as a programme. When, as a student, his teacher Charles Gleyre inquired whether ‘it’s to amuse yourself that you are dabbling in paint?’, Renoir was forthright in his response: ‘If it didn’t amuse ...”

“... has increasingly been seen to encapsulate, or express, a nation drunk on its own mythology and self-satisfaction; or, as Patrick McGuinness memorably put it in the LRB of 3 January, one ‘high on its own supply’. We have been told that Britain – for which read England, for which read English people and English politicians (though two of the worst ...”

“... Tony Blair​ ’s long-winded memoir A Journey (2010) is strikingly light on self-recrimination. He regrets ‘with every fibre of my being’ the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, but ‘can’t regret the decision to go to war’. George W. Bush was ‘a true idealist’. Even Silvio Berlusconi comes in for praise ...”

“... a brand new day? The Biden administration has announced that Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and self-emancipated freewoman, will appear on the $20 bill. The portrait of a person once regarded as capital is to be printed on a banknote. Dark-skinned people, like those who cleaned up the Capitol building after 6 January, have always had to do a lot of work ...”

“... the city, and Thailand in general, ‘as a place of exile that sometimes fosters a taste for self-invention’. It’s now his home but when he first turned up there in the 1990s it was to drink and have adventures (which included being picked up by a middle-aged Japanese woman, going back to her hotel room for sex and stealing money from her ...”

“... well as highly developed economies. A strong case for this can be made on the basis of enlightened self-interest, but after so much suffering and death some genuine altruism wouldn’t go amiss.19 ...”

“... I didn’t use then and don’t use now. I ask at the cycle shop if anyone has thought of making self-adhesive puncture patches. No one has. 15 October, Yorkshire. If Mr Parkinson and Miss Keays would only get together they could call the baby Frances Parkinson Keays. 20 December, New York. A sign on Seventh Avenue at Sheridan Square: ‘Ears pierced, with ...”

“... contrary even with contrarians and comfortable in her contradictions. She even revelled in them self-parodically: accepting honours (the DBE) from the monarchy she rejected, rooting for England in the cricket against her native Australia, though she loathed the British Empire and excoriated its methods and its legacy in her last book, Oh Happy Day: Those ...”

“... industry: but they are unlikely to accept that Chamberlain’s career was as unproblematic and self-explanatory as his narrative ...”

“... to emerge, the map should be used cautiously’. This is a necessary warning: if the guilt, the self-loathing, the sheer demoralisation of much of this fiction were the predominant mood of the real South Africa, not just of its fictional representation in the pages of A Land Apart, Nelson Mandela would be prime minister before the year was out.In the ...”

“... tax while deploring the press they relentlessly deploy. They fill their days topping up their self-pity and complaining that they haven’t yet got the knighthood they so clearly deserve. There’s a sense of hangover in Tom Bower’s book, as if the grand Thatcherite party finally met the morning, as if Brexit and designer gear and ‘no such thing as ...”