“... or tried to: but then there is something that is English about Kafka, and it is not only his self-deprecation. A vegetarian and fond of the sun, he seems a familiar crank; if he’d been living in England at the turn of the century, and not in Prague, one can imagine him going out hiking and spending evenings with like-minded friends in Letchworth. He is ...”

“... lebensraum, exemption. They rely on skills which are no longer openly desirable at home – rugged self-reliance and bush warfare – and live in accordance with a tribal mythology that other Afrikaners, the real volk who cannot accompany them, are obliged to set aside. Unlike their forbears, the EO trekkers can return every few weeks to the spouse and ...”

“... of turbulence and discord’. The partners ‘repeatedly erred on the side of distance and self-containment’, and the match was inevitably doomed. In ‘the better phases of the Polish-Jewish experiment’, in happier moments of ‘genuine fraternity’, in periods when ‘the streets of Poland’s cities and the paths of its shtetls did not seethe ...”

“... to heal the wounds of religion, already a version of Stephen Dedalus? By the end of the book, in self-imposed exile, he’s even answering to the name of Stephen.Other ambitious 20th-century American writers have tried to find a way of synthesising the internal perspective and the external, subjective experience and newspaper headline, impression and ...”

“... for them, must be set in a broader historical and geographical context: namely the state and self-image of the nation in which the concerts have taken place almost uninterruptedly for a century and more. For the imperial Britain in which Henry Wood’s Proms began in the summer of 1895 was a very different place from the post-imperial Britain in which ...”

“... wet-bulb temperatures. There will be no flashpoint in the climate crisis, no moment with a self-revealing logic so clear as to be incontestable. Direct action can be a form of pedagogy, but it requires allies in press and politics. It is striking that in 2021 only two environmental champions of global standing come to mind, both politically anomalous ...”

“... had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone.The most sinister indictment of modern political sexism was the fact that there was no female equivalent for the term Absolute Boy. It was not just that the current leader of the Labour Party was the Absolute Boy, it was that ...”

“... a cluster of pubs could safely navigate. Ships on weathervanes and pub signs confirmed London’s self-confidence as a world port. But the tarnished galleon on Whiston Road was empty, its immigrants dispersed. Alfred Cross, who argued in his 1906 treatise for the employment of specialist architects rather than borough engineers, had earlier won the commission ...”

“... pills myself), I raised my schoolboy hand and said that – speaking for my own constituency of self-important young punks – all this grievous old rock’n’roll baloney was, like, strictly for the old people’s home. Instead of taking offence at my point of order, Smith seemed instantly smitten with my pale, malnourished UK gall and, oh my god, is she ...”

“... the poison cloud spreading over Europe, ‘rampant incompetence, cover-ups at all levels, and self-destructive secrecy at the top’. Gorbachev said nothing for weeks until his outburst to the Politburo: the industry was ‘dominated by servility, bootlicking, cliquishness and persecution of those who think differently’. Chernobyl had ‘really opened ...”

“... in order to provide a way in to his other services. Conte emerges from this book as an obsessive self-publicist with a limited grip on reality; but it is also clear that this was part of his appeal. His willingness to promote anything, including his own brands of snake oil, was invaluable to his clients, who were later able to claim that they were merely ...”

“... of passage and perhaps because their common sense exists in inverse proportion to their sense of self-importance. By the time I arrive in court, hit as I enter by the smell of floor polish, on the one hand, and dope seeping through the skin, on the other, lawyers and punters are already milling around the waiting area. I have been to see the prosecutor in ...”

“... afternoon in October 1988, I was leaving a friend’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a self-important rush: a medical student also getting a degree in anthropology, I was headed back to Haiti, then experiencing a great political upheaval. My friend was one of the founders of Partners In Health, which we believed, even then, might make a difference ...”

“... this characterisation. The accident happened.’ The bank’s governance ‘represents a model of self-delusion, of the triumph of process over purpose’ and its history amounts to ‘a manual for bad banking’. This was nothing to do with go-go derivatives and fancy mathematical engineering; it was nothing to do with overpaid investment bankers making bets ...”

“... modern political analysis, the moment when someone finally pointed out that public figures are as self-interested as the rest of us. The only trouble is that all the evidence suggests Astor was telling the truth, and Rice-Davies was lying. Maybe he would, but in the end he didn’t, did he? Davenport-Hines writes: ‘One of the cruellest details of the ...”