“... bombed PLO buildings in Tunis, killing several dozen civilians: this was termed ‘understandable self-defence’ by the President. It turned out later that Jonathan Pollard, given a life sentence in America in March of this year, had handed over the requisite information about PLO offices to Israel, as part of a spying operation. Here was a weird ...”

“... great and immensely popular – he was apt to address his new friend with an exceptional degree of self-infatuated portentousness. He was already well into Pierre when he wrote to Hawthorne in November 1851, still exhilarated by Hawthorne’s response to Moby-Dick, to whom the book was dedicated: ‘I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb ...”

“... is most remarkable or admirable about him that he seems to have purified himself, exemplifying the self-purifying capacities of the Ausländer?It is interesting that these arguments about Kafka’s German are recirculating now, just as Angela Merkel has announced the failure of multiculturalism in Germany and marshalled as evidence the further claim that new ...”

“... hot weather came and sit up to their necks in ponds; not so the descendants of the industrious, self-mortifying saints who imported the Protestant ethic wholesale into a country intended for the siesta and are proud, proud! of flying in the face of nature. In most latitudes with summers like these, everything slows down, then. You stay all day in penumbra ...”

“... as Soviet citizens and custodians of their cultures, which retained the right to outright self-determination. Phinney acknowledged the necessity of the developmentalism imposed by the US state but pointed out that it was hardly in Indian interests to become proletarians at the same level as the poorest people in the country. ‘The US ...”

“... the hills of Sheffield, my pains vanished, my joints springing, swinging my bags of potatoes and self-raising flour as if they were feathers, as if I were self-raised myself, and scattering my careless laughter to the winds. For the time being, though, my spirits had sunk. The drugs seemed to be having an effect, but not ...”

“... had generated a ‘schizophrenic personality on the question of race’. There was the self that ‘proudly professed the great principles of democracy, and a self in which she madly practised the antithesis of democracy’. White backlash was ‘nothing new’, merely the ‘resurfacing of old ...”

“... made by the leadership. Clinton gave one hostage to fortune in this otherwise anodyne and self-serving address, which too obviously identified with a man of obscure – not to say shady – background who had lifelong problems with the press. Speaking of ‘family, friends and nation’ (who wrote that?), Clinton addressed the Nixon kin and ...”

“... the mysterious figure of Sollers emerges, like the Cheshire Cat – cynic or joyous iconoclast, self-punishing theoretician or opportunist on a grand scale, genuine writer or literary charlatan, with the gift either for ‘friendship’ or for intimidation? Perhaps the secret lies in these alternations, this fundamental ambiguity, as the double focus of his ...”

“... elegance was achieved, it now emerges, only after numerous reshapings; Roussel quarried its seven self-contained chapters from a vast, sprawling draft almost twice as long as the published version. This involved discarding the further adventures of characters, such as the sybil Felicity, who nonetheless appear in the final text, as well as a number of wholly ...”

“... state the judiciary would have to have – as it does in the United States – a full apparatus of self-government. Any such apparatus requires a budget, and the source of any such budget must be public funds. Either, therefore, the system of justice must be self-financing through court fees and the like, or the Treasury ...”

“... thought his sexual preferences, however proper by his own lights, liable to be destructive, even self-destructive. Beatrice Webb (over whose marriage he innocently hovered) spoke harshly of his brand of philandering. She had begun by disliking him, but came to know his value, and did not want him spoiled; in 1897 she complained that ‘his sensuality has all ...”

“... of the quest story, brought to literary respectability by Raymond Chandler, has collapsed into self-parody and a decadent excess of style. A cinema of ghosts represented by the cruel distance between The Big Sleep as realised by Howard Hawks in 1946, from a script by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, and the sad remake, written and ...”

“... to be bound by the constraints of a ‘bilateral foreign policy’? The consequence of these self-doubts is that the major conservative parties in the pan-European world are crumbling, torn apart by divisions between economic liberalism and social conservatism, whether of the kind that wishes the state to rectify the degraded morality of the citizenry or ...”

“... of their fellow countrymen and ‘influence the course of national policy’. ‘The British self-governing Dominions – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa – feel with us that Britain is geographically and historically a part of Europe, and that they also have their inheritance in Europe,’ Churchill continued. ‘If Europe united is to be ...”