“... of the husband is getting shakier every day.’ Gazing at the horizon, she pistons forward on a self-imposed treadmill: a comrade-athlete driving, by force of will, the engine of the city. This is East London, four years short of that 17-day corporate extravaganza, the ‘primary strategic objective’ to which we are all so deeply mortgaged. Haggerston ...”

“... deep, familiar, in-the-grain affair. Nowhere in its vicinity could you find a reassuring alloy of self-love. The broad iconoclasm led some of his fans to hope for political satire, but, with allowances for bile, he was essentially a New Deal liberal and outwardly as unpolitical as Will Rogers, whom he would come to know and like. A revealing exception ...”

“... of collective inertia. Purdy contemplates ‘the ideal of Anthropocene democracy’: ‘Self-aware, collective engagement with the question of what kinds of landscapes, what kind of atmosphere and climate, and what kind of world-shaping habitation to pursue would all be parts of the repertoire of ...”

“... your cheek, the modern fantasy of choice and control will whisper to the age-old fantasy of ‘self’ knocking about your brain that having or not having a child is a decision. And you will make it. Or you won’t. Or you will feel – with rage, or sorrow, or relief – that it has been made for you. But the fantasy of choice quickly begins to dissipate ...”

“... he would preach. The highest values were knowledge (as opposed to understanding), duty and self-control, in a harmony of which music was the ritual expression. The basic duty was consideration for others, according to their rank. Rulers were owed obedience by their subjects, as parents by their children, and husbands by their wives. But should they ...”

“... of things drew him into the movement: his childhood experience of racist murders, an instinct for self-defence, and the charismatic influence of the Panther members from Chicago who visited North Carolina to inspire younger black men to force a change in the fabric of America, and, Terry said as the truck sped forward into the Alabama sun, ‘to kill a few ...”

“... letters home from a very bright pupil at a very philosophical school, perhaps – and not the self-congratulatory musings of late career. Certainly it does not torment him, as it did Nietzsche’s ripe sage, that ‘he cannot be the last thinker.’ The sense is present all the time that philosophy and other creative activities continue, that nothing will ...”

“... sonata that recurs in A la Recherche. Striking about the musicians is their total absence of self-importance. They play a passage, listen to it back, then give each other notes, and run over sections again. George Fenton, who is co-ordinating the music, also chips in, but he’s a musician. David Hunter, the director, chips in too, but he isn’t a ...”

“... But two characters who scarcely get a look in throughout the Wharton volume, thanks to his self-effacing class-consciousness, are really the central characters of Mr Han-Davis’s wonderfully readable book. They are the proprietor, Michael Berry, and his extraordinary wife, Lady Pamela Berry. Mr Hart-Davis’s account of ‘Mister ...”

“... not involve a stripping rather than a toughening of the skin. Before the memory of her younger self – a girl she barely recognises now – vanishes altogether, she intends to peel away the accumulated layers ‘the way some people can peel an orange, in one exquisite unbroken spiral’. Yet if Audrey has been endowed with some special insight, she has ...”

“... wit of his novels and his letters, The thousands of letters he wrote, laced though they are with self-pity and dismay, quite often ring with the pleasure he seems to have taken in writing them. That is some relief, even in this dark ...”

“... sons from war. Further to the west, Slovene and Croatian populations are being mobilised into self-defence units. Many young Slovenes and Croatians are dying – together with young army conscripts from all parts of the country. And all the time the supposed Yugoslav capital remains calm. The military may have taken charge of the country’s politics, but ...”

“... rapid reading’. Nor did he wish to be judged by this public. Therefore he set out to write a self-portrait, and he did so in dialogue form, a form which he had already used and which enabled him to escape from the tyranny of narrative. The Dialogues are therefore, in Foucault’s words, ‘Anti-Confessions’. The work consists of three dialogues between ...”

“... with him. Shri Chandra Swamiji Maharaj (popularly known as ‘the Swami’) is a worldly, self-promoting Indian guru, who subsequently proved to be the source of a lot of Mr ‘Tiny’ Rowland’s more eccentric information about the Sultan/Al-Fayed connection – though hardly a particularly public-spirited one, since at least two million dollars ...”

“... against the arrogance of power which forty years of one-party rule has induced in the leaders. The self-certitude of the Communists had been tolerated and even admired in the Fifties, when nationwide poverty ana chaos cried out for strong measures. Now, bruised by the vicious personal power struggles and abrupt policy turnabouts of those forty years, the Party ...”