“... of the editor. The disbandment of a team of highly-qualified journalists with the independence and self-confidence to carry out inquiries which might damage powerful people made Sunday Times staff still more subservient to the editor. Yoel Cohen shows in detail how, man for man and woman for woman, the investigative journalists on the Sunday Times in 1986 were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... only escape Keenan could contrive was the kind familiar to writers. ‘I decided to become my own self-observer, caring little for what I did or said, letting madness take me where it would as long as I stood outside it and watched it. I would be the voyeur of myself. This strategy I employed for the rest of my time in captivity.’ Another, equally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as I remember. Nothing came of it.’ Hobbs was as unimpressed as ‘the sort’: Wayne’s self-image as a yuppie gangster, dealing in coke and controlling his environment through his own use of the drug, is somewhat at odds with the spotty, slightly dishevelled figure in the saloon bar of the City Arms. Wayne’s skin is at once acne-scarred and ...”

“... of inconclusive intimacy, established through the frames of two windows. The new propensity for self-conscious theatricality that emerged in the early years of the century mixed in ensuing decades with the loquacious speech of various immigrant groups to create a culture of everyday, semi-public performance – comedic, pathetic, histrionic – which would ...”

“... was in Smyllie’s favourite Palace Bar in Dublin that he kept hearing tales of George Moore, that self-proclaimed peculiar man (‘I couldn’t be commonplace were I to try’). He could hardly have picked on a more slippery figure for a biography; a man whose three lively books of reminiscence were riddled with fantasy, who invented other people’s lives ...”

“... many gay people; I was so busy being picked up on the beach. (I was rather unbalanced and very self-destructive.) I tell Arthur about Pirate Bill, whom I’d met in a bar; he’d invited me out on his boat, boasting that he’d been in prison for smuggling mercury. (Arthur points out that mercury is legal, so how could Pirate Bill have been smuggling ...”

“... of people in Hollywood’. Hysteria is never far off.) The confidence isn’t quite real, but more self-kidding, slippery. Yet the picture (Kelly’s smile) is not a picture of it slipping, but of the grip it’s held in, the fist so tight it’s shaking. This, I suppose, is what people mean when they say they always thought Gene Kelly’s smile was ...”

“... paintings rather than sketching theories. It is hard to imagine a better introduction to the self-involvement of Klee’s pictures than a very early essay collected here; and the same power of explanation, augmented but not radically altered by experience, animates his later studies of Giacometti and Jasper Johns. He is most at home with the art of the ...”

“... like Sir Richard Burton, Lord Cromer, T.E. Lawrence, Gérard de Nerval and Renan, all good for self-damning soundbites, but whose influence on serious academic study of the history, languages and religions of the Middle East was pretty negligible. One cannot understand Lewis’s intellectual formation without looking at the more weighty academic ...”

“... ago lost any instinctive respect for monarchy. Charles Powell’s new portrait of Juan Carlos as a self-made monarch is generous in the degree of clairvoyance and sense of purpose he claims for a young man who had been feeling his way towards a parliamentary monarchy through the labyrinthine politics of latter-day Francoism; and his account of the King’s ...”

“... the horsepower of the market to social welfare and social justice, in functional rather than self-defeating ways, also forms part of that history. Maybe it is time to put the horse before the ...”

“... Left. Cockburn and Silverstein personalise politics to underline the gap between an exploitative, self-satisfied élite and the economically and politically disenfranchised. They are promoting an anti-royalist uprising. In spite of the one-sentence call to arms that ends Washington Babylon, however, it is the Right and not the Left that has capitalised ...”

“... I had the nerve.’ But the adrenalin that comes from these literary crimes creates a whole other self – he becomes a book collector. Walter Benjamin wrote of the different ways to acquire books: one could write them oneself, one could borrow them, ‘with its attendant non-returning’, one could buy them from catalogues, auctions or bookshops. He ...”