“... vows was lax indeed. Her entire upbringing and education led her to become skilled in the art of self-suppression and pretence. She had pretended she was rich; now she could pretend she was, as the phrase goes, happily married. During her years in the White House she did the second of these with immense style and care and some success, so that her ...”

“... of the two defeated republics; not to speak of the relatively early return to them of a measure of self-government. This last move he described as putting the Boers ‘into a position to uphold and expand their primitive lust for racial domination’ – a statement seized on by various British biographers and essayists as evidence of how concerned he was ...”

“... about the organisation, which has proved an intellectual sink-hole, down which swirl the drearily self-serving memoirs of its one-time functionaries and mind-numbing pieties from assorted well-wishers in the universities. There is a reason for the peculiar deadness of this output. The UN is a political entity without any independent will. If we set aside its ...”

“... to female narcissism, this is a Christian morality tale intended to warn against the sin of self-love. Karen is cast out of her community and her church; she has her feet hacked off, and the story ends with her repentance. What we remember, though, is not the final image of her blissful reunion with God but the red shoes, with the little feet still in ...”

“... Revolution is that both Jimmy Wales and one of his first collaborators, Larry Sanger, are self-confessed and totally earnest ‘objectivists’, meaning followers of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Sanger wrote his doctoral thesis at Ohio State University under the title ‘Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification’. He and ...”

“... of Venezuela, and Latin America began another turn to the left. In one country after another, self-described socialists, from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, came to power. In April 2008, Fernando Lugo, a priest, became president of Paraguay, ending more than six ...”

“... way that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to be. I was riding high on sex and self-esteem – it was my time, my belle époque – but all the while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames around a photograph, something seen out of the corner of the eye.’ A novel published in 1988 that celebrated erotic adventures between men was ...”

“... The Referendum Party contested 547 seats and lost all of them. The story of how that idea, self-evidently ridiculous in 1997, came to be a reality in 2016 is going to be often retold as we live through its consequences over the next few decades. One of the characteristics of the story is a distinctly British unseriousness: tragedy and farce, as so ...”

“... expects better treatment, a situation that makes it impossible for anyone to develop autonomy or self-esteem. Later, when Ginzburg took the unusual step of asking her own sons to be early readers and critics of what she was writing, she noticed that her eldest would always take pleasure in insulting her work. ‘I think insulting me is one of the pleasures ...”

“... was head of state for seven months between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma – is hosting a feast of self-enrichment, ‘tenderpreneurship’ and peculation. Johnson is thoroughly uncontroversial when he points out that the result is a hard-core elite cordoned off from reality in gated fiefdoms where they dispense patronage and create jobs for a retinue of ...”

“... palaver of generations because, simple to the point of transparency, it is also impenetrably self-enclosed. It is held in a brilliant web of balance and contradiction by a few hundred words; so it is worth looking at those words and what they actually mean. Just to be clear: there was no seduction. There was no devil, nor any mention of Satan, who ...”

“... probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate.’ Her amnesia isn’t straightforwardly self-protective, since one of the things she does remember is her husband saying, when she was in hospital to give birth: ‘Now you are going to have to learn to love something, you wicked woman.’ The unnamed ‘yard boy’ who gives another story its title is ...”

“... women but a problem ‘about’ women. Women are under-confident; they don’t step up; they lack self-belief. The female reviewers of the Irish Times clearly did step up, reviewing both men and other women, so just for a moment I would like to stop saying, ‘the problem with women is …’ and start looking in another direction. Affinity is a joyful ...”

“... he forgets what he has done. When his opinions are ingrained they are immovable. In another self-serving anecdote for which Cohn must be the source, Woodward reports this circular exchange: Several times Cohn asked the president, ‘Why do you have these views?’ ‘I just do,’ Trump replied. ‘I’ve had these views for 30 years.’ ‘That ...”

“... to dispensing advice. (Himself the giver of so much advice, he seems to have entered the ranks of self-help books, or American wisdom literature: see, for example, Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties.) The sage Tolstoy, while admitting Andreas-Salomé to his circle, had unforgettably snubbed him. Rodin humbled him with his all-too visible, massive, unfussy ...”