“... the same proprietor could employ John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express, narrow, bigoted and self-righteous, who could have featured with minimal anachronism at a 17th-century witch trial, and Screaming Tom Driberg, no nicer but in quite different ways, promoting fellatio like the gospel? Both were horrid, both useful and both, if not always by ...”

“... political solution awaits the resolution of blood feuds among Africa’s Cosa Nostra. Aideed, the self-proclaimed conqueror of Barre, sees himself as Somalia’s don of dons. His pretensions are challenged by, among others, the Somali National Movement, which has claimed independence for the northern territories once ruled by Britain; and by the rump of ...”

“... my feeling is of having seen reason denied in favour of something which I suspect Garner’s best self would not want to subscribe to: flower power – the apotheosis of the hippy ...”

“... own land, but only have the right to ‘use and improve’ it. With every household sized for self-sufficiency, Wright reasoned, there could be no proletariat. Nor would every resident be condemned to agricultural labour. The project would also include the spectacularly capitalistic ‘Mile-High Illinois’ skyscraper, with 528 storeys, out-rigged ...”

“... without attempting to provide a rationale for republican government. This was not, then, a self-conscious, nation-building revolution like the American and French ones that followed. Again with reverberations in our time, the northern Netherlands was an asylum land, taking in many and diverse immigrants – among them, the rush of refugees who came ...”

“... things to think about here, and the movie lets us think. ‘She was dead,’ the husband says in self-defence in both the story and the film. What was he supposed to do? In the story the wife says: ‘That’s the point. She was dead. But don’t you see? She needed help.’ If we can’t help the dead, perhaps we can’t (or won’t) help the living. Altman ...”

“... they share many assumptions, and they both deal in elaborate fictions, where courtesy, tactics, self-deception and opportunism become inextricably entangled. Did Montezuma, the ruler if the Mexica of ancient Tenochtitlán, actually declare his allegiance to the Spanish Crown, or did Cortés just say he did? Did Cortés take Mexican courtesy for European ...”

“... His strange appeal for the reader perhaps lies in things which also make Jorrocks oddly appealing: self-reliance, intense and simple emotions, a capacity for commitment, dignity despite being ignoble. Norman Gash refers to The Mayor of Casterbridge when he is describing the career of a footman called Luff, who rose to be mayor of Blandford. Such things did ...”

“... then it is no great further step to say that when the filament snaps the balloon is still self-sufficient.’ A couple of months after offering these speculations at the prompting of his sons’ experience, Doyle declares in Light that they have resulted in his receiving ‘a mass of definite testimony’ of a confirmatory character. ‘The instances ...”

“... it was also a principle or device that he worked very hard in his own life. The Shavian trick of self-praise is the most obvious instance. But it also has a close inverse relationship to his habit of stealing his adversaries’ clothes: for instance, utterly refusing to quarrel with them, and ingeniously explaining to them that their claim to dislike him is ...”

“... journalists working their arses off behind the wire getting the paper out are becoming sick of the self-appointed consciences of the Sunday Times sitting in the Gray’s Inn Road. At lunchtime two-thirds of the refuseniks leave for Wapping amid handshakes, hugs and tears. I decide that I need the weekend to think about the future. Virtually everyone I care ...”

“... from time to time the writer becomes aware of the fact he may be tempted to over-compensate with self-conscious bursts of local colour. This is the trap into which Joseph Hone has fallen in his Children of the Country. He has some excuse, perhaps, in that he was frustrated in his original purpose, which was to cross the African continent from the Indian ...”

“... the lowliest: these bugs tonight like high-roast coffee beans that fling themselves at flames and self-destruct, that blue wasp juicing bugs like tangerines, fat bucking locusts jockeyed on and sucked, these trawling spiders that have rigged their nets halfway between our porchlamps and the night, their dawn webs threaded with dew jewelettes and hauls of ...”

“... Refuses’, is the most vivid and absorbing part of Novel with Cocaine, because Maslennikov’s self-castigation has not yet become obsessive; most of his attention here is devoted to the quirky personalities of his schoolmates, all of whom are more engaging than Maslennikov himself. He moves on from them into a pointless affair with an older woman and ...”

“... with a number of engaging lunacies. Consider the conjecture that Heraclitus’s ‘great feat of self-expression in prose and in philosophy’ was not equalled until Montaigne published his Essays. Or better, relish the suggestion that lyric poetry ‘for all we know to the contrary may be prehuman’. And some may find equally charming the more frequent ...”