“... 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 ...”

“... enormous influence on the Islamic revivalist movement. Published in 1964, it is a contradictory, self-referential, anti-semitic tract that calls for war against the non-Islamic world to establish a universal Islam, following which the conquered – or, as Qutb puts it, liberated – will be free to believe what they wish. Qutb insists that the world – not ...”

“... the Jew-hating of Time’s Arrow (1991), the class loathing of London Fields (1989), the self-loathing of Money (1984) – but in trying to address Islamofascism his resources fail him. He hates so much that he can’t begin to see what it is that the haters hate. Amis used to have a means of rebutting a vicious argument: a single rhetorical ...”

“... nothing personal about Woodward, his books, journalism and public presentation, little that’s self-revealing. But then the people he writes about, usually men who dress, as Woodward does, in dark suits, plain ties and light blue shirts, the better to be observed on TV – they never reveal much of themselves.What is known about Woodward? He’s a former ...”

“... could go after a first flush of virtuosity to ensure that his poems were not some elegant form of self-congratulation: there was always another step worth taking away from the well-turned ornament. ‘Memory’ is undated. It may have been written before the ‘Last Poems’ of 1872, sometimes known as ‘New Poems’ or ‘Songs’, but this is where it has ...”

“... exposition of the duty of the defence counsel, delivered at the trial of Queen Caroline, as ‘self-serving prattle’ which became ‘window-dressing for a truth-be-damned standard of defensive representation’, and to describe as ‘antics’ John Lilburne’s courageous refusal in 1649 to incriminate himself on a treason charge. Seen through such ...”

“... the Italian Un grido lacerante – it is a naked book, a book of widow’s suffering, of clamorous self-deprecation. How bereft and without value she has felt since the death of il Maestro – which is how Banti’s alter ego narrator, Agnese, refers to her magisterial husband throughout the novel. (The English translation has her call him, somewhat less ...”

“... were the words notoriously used by Herbert Morrison when he rejected the idea of self-government for some colonies in 1943: it would be like giving these things, he said, to ‘a child of ten’.) Britain needed to have completed the job. But that emphatically wasn’t the situation in most colonial territories. Before 1938, and excepting ...”

“... fractures of 1956, when people in the ‘developing world’ sided with Algeria’s struggle for self-determination, while Western countries backed Hungary’s resistance to Soviet invasion.) In countries that fought to overcome colonial rule, white domination and apartheid, the Palestinian struggle for independence, in conditions of grotesque ...”

“... means lively, with a hint at wicked. This inaugural descant at once yields, by way of self-correction, to compliments paid to the trio of eye, smile and foot. Lockwood, after all, has already shown himself amply susceptible to such manifestations. At which point the sentence begins in earnest. Marshalled by semi-colons, its three further ...”

“... development. Unlike modern estates, which tend to be tacked onto existing conurbations, it was self-sufficient. It had schools, shops, pubs and a large church. ‘It was fantastic,’ Whitley says. ‘Well-made houses, big gardens, plenty of open spaces, football pitches. The buses from Cammell Laird to the docks used to flood the estate.’Forty years ...”

“... what you found there.The experience of using a chatbot powered by an LLM is, by contrast, largely self-contained. You can usually prompt it to say something about its sources, but that’s a bit like the ‘further reading’ at the end of a textbook chapter: you know you should read them, but you probably won’t. It’s seductively easy to treat a chatbot ...”

“... enthusiasm. But when he came to write The New Few, an assault on Britain’s fall into the grip of self-seeking oligarchies of one kind or another, he made it clear that the EU was a still more extreme case of the same disease, in a chapter entitled ‘Stuck on the Eurostar’. These European symptoms didn’t leave Britain unaffected. ‘Belonging to the EU ...”