“... Her granddaughter adored her accent and her refined manners. As the middle child, Britney was both self-sufficient and eager for attention. She doted on her older brother, Bryan, and her baby sister, Jamie Lynn. Britney’s talent for singing and dancing was apparent from the age of four. Lynne took her to dance classes, gymnastics, singing competitions and TV ...”

“... 1938, apparently unaware that the appeasers of Fascism then were precisely those who argued that self-determination was a paramount principle. The anti-war respondents have cranked out little of greater interest, for the most part thrashing the soft and safe targets of political bungling in the past, Mrs Thatcher’s use of the war as domestic propaganda for ...”

“... by this relentlessly personalised, crudely ‘psychologising’ method to Brechtian evasiveness or self-interest. Indeed, Hayman often seems less concerned with critical appreciation of the plays than with using them to diminish and put down the man and his politics. Witness, for instance, his extraordinary treatment of Man is man, Brecht’s famous ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... section of the first movement of the New World Symphony. The music I intrude on is intense and self-absorbed. I am like a child in a children’s book who has stumbled through a gap in reality and fallen headlong into another world. I pick myself up and follow Dvořák’s gangly, adolescent theme as it strides from instrument to instrument and key to key ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a national minority: they were part of a wider Arab nation that had already realised its right to self-determination in some twenty countries. Within the Land of Israel they were a minority entitled only to civil and religious rights. The PLO was perceived by Begin not as a national liberation movement but as a terrorist organisation pure and simple. He made ...”

“... of Mason & Dixon is more than a century more inchoate, and so is the world around it. The ‘self-evident truths’ which codify the Rights of Man would not be declared on that continent until 1774. They would not be declared in Europe until 1789.Over the entirety of the novel, barely a line sets out to delineate a sense of historical period in the way I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... argue that when his client was appointed commander of Central Bosnia in spring 1992, he found a self-styled citizens’ army, lacking both technical equipment and discipline. He is fond of telling the story of a man who sold his tractor and bought an anti-aircraft gun, which he used as he pleased from his front garden. What the former Chief Prosecutor of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the several drafts of his unfinished autobiography – more of this later – Gibbon made two self-exculpatory statements: one that he had not anticipated causing so much offence, the other that he might have written differently had he known that his English readers were still ‘so fondly attached to the name and shadow of Christianity’. The two do not ...”

“... 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 ...”