“... once pure stream merely stinks – failing even to meander properly through the putrid valley. ‘Self-love’ swarms over the body of society, while loathing and contempt fester between ‘Brother ploughman’ and the new millionaire. But as Oliver is careful to show, ‘near at hand’ disorders such as these remain unseen if the eye is kept firmly fastened ...”

“... unbalanced, apt to express an opinion and to exhibit an author. Broad as its sympathies were, and self-effacing as Reitz may have wished to be, Heimat was not a balanced programme, and Margaret Thatcher would have found it unfair to entrepreneurs. Noel Annan has been saying in strong terms that the BBC has a duty to be ‘dispassionate’ about affairs of ...”

“... and in direct taxation, a cutback in the role of the state, more individual responsibility and self-reliance – in short, as she liked to put it, a return to ‘Victorian values’. The intellectual origins of all this go back a long way: David Green starts with a brief conducted tour of Locke, Hume and Adam Smith. Of more immediate interest are the ...”

“... working on ‘a United Nations project’ and is not pressed for further details: ‘Project is a self-contained phrase and may or may not be capable of elaboration.’ TM muses: ‘I come across the word in newspapers and among academicians, engineers and adventurers. One might hear the word and keep quiet, no probing further.’ Rann might have sunk into ...”

“... quality of folk-sayings, fragments of a forgotten oral tradition, while her apophthegms sound self-evident, statements of moral fact. Within this robust structure the most delicate shades of subjectivity find shelter and flourish. Kate’s perception of other people’s motives and feelings is unfailingly scrupulous and acute, while the dialogue is ...”

“... one tenth of the actual flow rate and was dismissed in the US media as another of Hayward’s self-serving lies. Bergin, however, reports that BP’s engineers built the 5000-barrel estimate into their models when attempting to cap the spill. In his analysis, this mistake prolonged the spill by as much as a month, an indication of how unprepared BP was to ...”

“... chastened essays for Stedman Jones, it is impossible not to find the intellectual energy and even self-importance of these pieces refreshing. I can’t share Mary Poovey’s belief that Wall Street’s recurrent financial crises will be overcome only when we (whoever ‘we’ are) ‘understand that there is a relationship between the stories people tell ...”

“... people use money to get power and power to get money. The country is ruled by a narrow, self-serving elite who go through the motions of holding elections and transferring power. No one is fooled. When Putin moves from the office of president to prime minister and then back again, it is not exactly smoke and mirrors stuff. It’s just out one door ...”

“... UK regulatory body advised against its being prescribed to under-18s because of concerns about ‘self-harm and suicidal thoughts’, adding that its use in young adults over 18 should be ‘closely monitored’ and that Seroxat was associated with unusually unpleasant withdrawal reactions in patients of all ages. So yes, it’s more than plausible that, in ...”

“... secession from Nigeria and the war that followed became an inevitability.’ To him it is self-evident that an ethnic group known for its independence of mind could not easily be manipulated into supporting a war. He writes about the reaction among Igbo people after the Northern massacres: One found a new spirit among the people, a spirit one did not ...”

“... his own peculiar distillation of Islamic history and idealised bedouin values (egalitarianism, self-reliance). Despite his tribal background, there is now, thanks to him, a greater sense of a united Libya than ever existed before. What brought this about was the redistribution of oil income, which in the 1970s and 1980s dramatically increased the living ...”

“... is, therefore, for each people a collective force of a definite amount of energy, impelling men to self-destruction. The victim’s acts which at first seem to express only his personal temperament are really the supplement and prolongation of a social condition which they express externally. Masaryk, another early theorist of suicide, believed that it was ...”

“... an extra bind in the trunk. It wasn’t until Harry realised what a powerful tool for self-promotion they could be that they became the focus of the show. In November 1895 he walked into the police station in Gloucester, Massachusetts and challenged the officers to handcuff him. He then proceeded to pick his way out of every pair of cuffs they ...”

“... much more than You or Him.’ He should have listened. The great 19th-century novels here become self-help books to guide a worried young man around the world of emotions and family. We all start off reading books as if they contained the secrets of our life, and later come to see that their greatness lies in the fact that they do no such thing. It’s hard ...”

“... had some very sinister overtones for the papacy: Henry VIII had used it to justify his deeply self-righteous claim that he had never married a lady called Katherine of Aragon, and that God was very angry with him, both for having mistakenly thought that he had done so, and for allowing the pope to provide a dispensation for the marriage to take ...”