“... of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement tracts – volumes that were all in the grand, glass-fronted bookcase. Therein lay knowledge. Therein lay my father’s ...”

“... years and where her husband died is a luxury she doesn’t deserve. She’s been targeted for self-eviction. Essentially, the government is trying to starve her out. Without the government allowance she receives in the form of housing benefit, she cannot pay her rent, and the government has cut the allowance so it’s no longer enough to cover the rent on ...”

“... still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be seven thousand millionaires while four million people in the capital survive on $2 a day. Poverty is even more pronounced in rural areas. About eight million Angolans, or 37 per cent of the ...”

“... but he did so with eloquence: he could bring back Passchendaele in all its horrors without showing self-pity. Much later he made several appearances in a BBC TV series on the Great War.Nevertheless, I wonder about his Army career. He was out there for four years, with people dying like flies, yet the only promotion he ever got was from driver to signaller. He ...”

“... the mark of a town on its knees. To lose its high street is a bitter blow to a place’s sense of self-worth, but the collapse of traditional small retailers is hardly a mystery, when a shining, ample Morrisons sucks up shoppers in the heart of town, and retail warehouses and Amazon take most of the rest.Millions of pounds’ worth of regeneration money was ...”

“... were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell ...”

“... wife, ‘stuff[ed] away in a shabby apartment’. Said didn’t spare himself, including a mocking self-portrait of a clueless employee called Mufid who idles away his time on things that were ‘utterly lost on everyone else’. Brennan presents the lost manuscript (and a story Said submitted around the same time to the New Yorker) as evidence of the novelist ...”

“... moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, remembered a self-portrait Monroe drew alongside a sketch of a Negro girl in ‘a sad-looking dress, one sock falling down around her ankles’. And according to Gloria Steinem, when the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles was reluctant to hire a black singer named Ella ...”

“... misreading is not uncommon. The novel is seen as the archetypal Puritan adventure story, a self-sufficient fiction which transcends the controversies Defoe addresses in his journalism. This is rather like saying that TV programmes such as Castaway and Big Brother tell us nothing about the social moments that created them. Although some recent scholars ...”

“... worry that history which did not inform present-day concerns amounts to little more than self-indulgent antiquarianism, but presented his practice as socially useful for its ‘excavation’ of the hidden or misunderstood concepts that underpinned the modern state. Pocock, on the other hand, feels no embarrassment about the sorts of inquiry that ...”

“... line – well that would be a pretty small price to pay if only we could stop listening to those self-righteous fucking Americans. What would it take for this regime to stumble? People have been saying for a long time that Putin will not be tested until oil prices fall. Now oil prices are falling, and Putin-Medvedev are mostly blaming the United States and ...”

“... out in the memoir, which tells relatively little of her story, not only because it was written in self-defence but also because she lived another 24 eventful years after it was published. Mazarin died shortly after Hortense’s marriage, leaving her – or rather her husband – not only almost all of his fabulous wealth and property, but also his ...”

“... absence. Like Roller, Appia wanted his designs to act as a direct emanation of the music. But this self-effacing attitude to her husband’s work failed to impress Cosima, who told Appia’s somewhat improbable advocate Houston Stewart Chamberlain that his sketches reminded her ‘only of the pictures that the explorer Nansen had brought back from the North ...”

“... compromising the moral standing of the democratic state. Then, helpfully, the monarchy self-destructed: King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah was killed in a massacre at the royal palace in 2001, supposedly by his son. So addled was the Royal State Council that they named the son, comatose with a bullet to the head at the end of the killing spree, the next ...”

“... something desirable and rewarding in and for itself, a means towards human happiness, dignity and self-fulfilment, shaping a world in which ‘the idle are the only wretched.’ This dialectical pattern is traced in most of the chapters. The discussion of military prowess as an aspiration begins by outlining the aristocratic ideal which saw physical courage ...”