“... have contained such phrases as ‘something withheld’ – ‘wears too fixed a smile’ – ‘self-suppression everywhere’. These seem to be symptoms of reviewer’s terror, a well-known complaint like athlete’s foot, which hamstrings the reviewer’s normal responses through the fear that he must have missed some quite obvious point all his ...”

“... that all of this is perhaps cold comfort, and I do think that is so. The notion of a miracle is self-cancelling. If miracles did happen, they would be part of the natural order too, there being no place else for them to happen in. Conversely, to say something isn’t miraculous – that it isn’t intrinsically inexplicable – is, I suppose, just to say ...”

“... How is it that the writer who once dedicated a novel to Jeffrey Bernard, one of the most prominent self-proclaimed ‘delinquents’ of the Eighties, can now join in dedicating her latest work to ‘Feltham Borstal’? Loss of the Good Authority is the sequel to an earlier collaboration between ATE and Tom Pitt-Aikens (TPA), Secrets of Strangers, and it only ...”

“... policemen stand facing the red terror in raunchy rows, automatic rifles on one hip, expensive self-focusing Minoltas on the other. There was no violation to snap on the day I paid my visit. Just one bedraggled North Korean guard – Vera had been politically indifferent – to whom we were asked not to wave, or shake a fist, in case he should be able to ...”

“... strike us as being akin to a diary of Picasso’s imaginary life, with all the vividness, and the self-indulgence, that might suggest. The ‘347 Series’, as it has come to be known, is surely also the most impressive achievement of the artist’s late period. The prints have none of the solemn lyricism which is so remarkable in the Vollard Suite, but they ...”

“... Statesman. Various backers put money into it, including the remarkable George Jacob Holyoake, a self-educated working man, journalist, author, Chartist, Owenite and atheist: he boldly named one of his sons Robespierre, which must have made the boy’s life hard. He had been imprisoned for blasphemy before joining forces with Lewes and Hunt, and he formed a ...”

“... whether one likes it or not, rings uncomfortably true. And there is an excellent summary of the self-imposed limitations on the conduct of war that developed during the Clausewitzian era. Finally, there is a passage that is perhaps worth everything else in the book, in which he reminds us that the essential characteristic of soldiers is not that they are ...”

“... to Americans of all backgrounds. The primary effect of ‘dual loyalty’ has been a form of self-censorship that has kept the United States government from dealing rationally and coherently with the strategic and political issues rained by a nuclear-armed Israel ... Can the Arab nations truly be expected to ignore Israel’s possession of atomic weapons ...”

“... New Zealand Verse, which historians often use as a marker in the establishment of a distinct and self-reliant New Zealand literature. In 1951, the year Curnow, then aged 39, moved to Auckland to take up a lectureship at the university, I enrolled as a student. I remember my first sight of him, walking through Albert Park – and of course his lectures and ...”

“... have galloped the length and breadth of Eurasia leaving strangely mutilated versions of their own self-designation hither and yon in the chronicles of baffled and anxious scribes thousands of miles apart. Was Attila the Hun actually trying to pose as Attila the Hsiung-nu, and if so, why? Might he even have been the real thing? We shall probably never ...”

“... pattern of entwined flowers. Another has its three digits – 149 – stuck to the front gate with self-adhesive stickers. The numerals are black-on-silver and slant like italics. Not so long ago I would have held all this in contempt – curtains chosen to match wallpaper, the lifelike statuette of a cat about to pounce from the garage roof, the half-barrel ...”

“... But he would not answer. When the silence became too painful, I played with my body.’ Totally self-absorbed and beset by possibly imaginary ailments of every kind, she tried every method to find happiness. On the West Coast there were, of course, plenty available: spiritualism, exorcism, massage, exercise, diet, meditation. A rich eccentric called ...”

“... little stroke, and I can confirm that hearing is the last sense to go before black-out. A certain self-distancing curiosity about medical, clerical, liturgical and psychological issues to do with death management doubtless has roots deeper than I care to explore, but my late father used to make a point of reading Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Holy Dying’ to ...”

“... work out, showing how much the State spent on each of them: why was the State so stingy? It was a self-education through high spirits, courage, indignation and pity. In class (she was 14) they were studying Gogol’s story of two landowners, an elderly couple, condemned by the teacher as contributing nothing to society. But ‘they both die, and Gogol ...”

“... Because of this unintended deception, he approached the Myth of the Blitz ‘in a spirit almost of self-hatred’, but his determination to ‘undermine the credibility of the mythical narrative ... every which way’ has been lessened now that Thatcherism has declined and ‘the generation of Labourites for whom the war was unquestionably a “People’s ...”