“... complains that the young Newman was more ‘mannered’ than Brando. ‘He seems to me an uneasy, self-regarding personality, as if handsomeness had left him guilty.’ The impression given by the memoir is that handsomeness caused him not guilt but shame. The prettier he was, the more he was the creature his narcissistic mother wanted him to be, which was ...”

“... that a salutary strand of Puritanism is woven into the very ‘national heritage’ that the self-appointed guardians of the Rose and the Globe Theatres claim to be preserving. One of the major charges levelled by the Puritans against the playhouses of Shakespeare’s day was that they were involved in and encouraged idolatory: the worship of graven ...”

“... to Venusti, Perrig does not ask what evidence there is in Venusti’s documented work of restless, self-destructive revision – nor does he concede that Michelangelo’s late sculpture possesses precisely this quality. Perrig sometimes starts out with an engagingly sensible suggestion. He proposes that we should take seriously the fact that Tommaso ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... following Jeanne Proust’s death. There is a bid for morbid glamour here, as well as a lot of self-pity, but there is a terrific, ongoing grief too, and what Henri van Blarenberghe offered Proust was the astonishing image of a man who had lost his mother rather than killed her – or rather lost her by killing her, since he didn’t know what he was ...”

“... Israeli-Palestinian accommodation, had the occupying power intended to allow the occupied genuine self-rule with able, honest people’. This is wishful thinking. Those ‘able, honest people’ who talked to the Israelis didn’t hold much sway with the majority of Palestinians and it seems likely that they would have been stripped of authority in any real ...”

“... from its level four and a half minutes earlier. The market had entered a potentially catastrophic self-feeding downward spiral. Fortunately, though, the electronic trading platform on which these index futures were being bought and sold – the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s Globex system – is programmed to detect just such a spiral. Its ‘Stop Logic ...”

“... have been the good guys, Haneke makes unappealing and incapable of fighting back, their gated self-satisfaction turning into equally gated self-pity, so that our identification with them is held in check – though it is at the ready, as the audience reaction to the wife’s retaliation demonstrates. Haneke erases that ...”

“... of Joan of Arc came into focus, the depressive national mood was countered, for my childhood self, by a vision of gallantry under pressure, of a young woman’s heroism. The convent itself stood on the rue Edith Cavell, named after another heroine of the same selfless, courageous mould: Cavell (born 1865) worked as a nurse, a teacher and a spy in Belgium ...”

“... school I went to from 1946 until 1952, as a grammar school though I suppose it was. It wasn’t so self-conscious and pleased with itself as most of the schools that feature and the range of ability for which it catered seems in retrospect so wide it might well have been a comprehensive school before its time. Nor was it in the least bit snobbish as so many of ...”

“... in America, Britain and the Colonies swallowed the high-falutin’ classicism of their self-advertisements without the smallest particle of salt. Intoxicated by the glamour of their trade, they rummaged in reference books, delved into etymology, and eventually came up with a professional pedigree that stretched back into the mists of ...”

“... a suit – ‘I sell a lot of these suits to your sort of people’ – even though the jacket is self-evidently too small for him. Then the man’s baby starts to cry, and Barny wanders over to the cot. ‘What a lovely little picaninny,’ he oozes. Racism is Barny’s business plan. ‘I’m using me brains to the best of me ability,’ he ...”

“... and humans would go extinct before Musk could safeguard the future of the species by creating a self-sustaining colony on Mars, the raison d’être of his company SpaceX.* He said that if his companies didn’t make it, ‘humanity was fucked.’ He was at the mercy of journalists, but they were ‘idiots’ who had it in for him. He contemplated launching ...”

“... interviews (down to the quip about the watch), and it’s the image he presents in Unredacted, a self-exculpatory and score-settling memoir in which he represents himself as a truth-seeker standing up to a clueless cross-Atlantic establishment.Steele was born on a UK military base in Aden and spent time as a child at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus – the base for ...”

“... all’ personal reflections by Nobel-stature scientists themselves, most of which turn out to be self-celebrations, but it’s hard to think of any performance quite like The Impossible Man.Penrose’s father and mother were both cold and distant; polyhedral puzzles were one of the few vehicles for father-son contact. That’s one reason the puzzles were ...”