“... never became a good writer, since he wrote too much, too fast, on too many subjects, and without self-criticism and revision. Even at the time of his greatest influence, he was not taken very seriously as a theorist on the intellectual left, though he was, with Shaw, Wells, Marx, G.D.H. Cole and Tawney, among the authors who had had most influence on the ...”

“... concern for gentlemanly standards, that the House of Commons was ‘hardly the place for a self-respecting man’. His passion for serving on commissions, preferably royal ones, is curious, the more so because his first experience of such bodies was the one whose members were hell-bent on the retrocession of the Transvaal. This could have sickened him ...”

“... were unwilling to extend civil and political rights or to open themselves to electoral defeat. The self-deception, now, is clear. Interest rates in the North rose after the second oil-price rise in 1979, and the demand for imported food crops and other commodities began to decline. The cost of Southern countries’ debt went up, and their earnings went ...”

“... another inner part – a shrewd ironic part – knows that such yearning springs from sentimental self-delusion. So why pretend? Observers are what they are, not participants, and the wise ones don’t try to fool themselves or others about it. As Millman comments early in his book, travel is a ‘quick Fix’: ‘It entitles you to meet interesting people ...”

“... miles, my lord,’ or ‘fifteen miles.’ One of the nice things about Byron was his lack of self-assurance. Trelawney, who sneered behind his back at the club foot, claimed always to let himself be beaten in their races, and Byron himself wrote to a friend that he would far rather swim the Hellespont again than have to extricate himself from a painful ...”

“... Vanessa could only be a family woman. Her perceptive editor remarks that she presented herself in self-defence as ‘unintellectual and uninformed’, and that she made a ‘carefully constructed comic façade’ out of her lack of interest in serious matters. She enjoyed describing an occasion when she had made a fool of herself at a dinner party by asking ...”

“... from the time, about 1800, when a national idea dawned. There is a parallel in the process of self-hypnotism by which the Muslims of India tried to turn themselves into a nation. In Israel, unlike Pakistan, there has been much history-writing, whose quality it may be too early to estimate. The political outcome, however, is not presented here as one ...”

“... life into the work by actively exploring, not avoiding, the complex problems that Wordsworth’s self-account presents to his biographer. This does not mean that Gill attempts to square Wordsworth’s interpretations of his own life with each other and with the datable facts – an enterprise which would, he admits, lead only to confusion. His achievement is ...”

“... at crowd-control – at preventing a clash between rival fans – invalidated through lack of self-control. One of those struck in the incident struck back: ‘The only one who was a hooligan was Brian Clough.’ Clough’s chairman defended his action with an image which rang bells for René and me: ‘Fans know that it is wrong to come on to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... young man with whom Cheever had an affair at the end of his life, makes it sound like a comedy of self-delusion. ‘Have you ever had a homosexual experience?’ Susan Cheever asked her father, in an interview which was published by Newsweek. ‘My answer to that is, well, I have had many, Susie, and all between the ages of nine and eleven,’ Cheever ...”

“... function is, along with the columns of agony aunts and psychoanalysis, an aspect of social self-regulation. Middling kinds of person suffering from middling strokes of good and bad fortune are observed as they normalise their condition, or blamed or pitied or sympathised with for failing to do so. Leonora Carrington, on the other hand, writes of ...”

“... blackballings were, of course, the result of the author’s temerity in another sphere: that of self-appointed rectifier of miscarriages in the courts. Many readers will turn to this book in an effort to discover what motivated a man born into the Establishment to rock the judicial ark, a role which hardly seems to square with his breezy, sanguine public ...”

“... voted him in. In Venezuela, Perez is taking a similar line against his own once-comfortable and self-serving supporters. In Mexico, Salinas has seen the red light in the international institutions and in his own reduced votes, and is trying to reduce the power of the corporate bodies, both business and union, which his party has been serving since the late ...”