“... expression she gives to her deeply inhibited and perverse sexual nature: gruesome episodes of self-harming, ritual exploits in seedy voyeurism, infantile excursions into low-grade pornography. At home she dances a grim pas de deux of mutual exploitation with her old mother. At work, as a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatoire, she assumes the role of ...”

“... that the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake: President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship’s commander and crew were awarded high military honours. Two days after the downing of the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in blood-splattered ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his support to right-wing libertarianism, and ended up endorsing Ayn Rand’s tirades against ‘self-styled “intellectuals”’ – ‘moral cannibals’ and ‘gigolos of science’ – who mislead the masses with their ‘prattle’ about the unfairness of capitalism.The Paris symposium gave a similar fillip to another Austrian economist, Friedrich ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the redemptive powers of fracking don’t pooh-pooh the Nixon/Carter call for democratic self-discipline. They just apply it to something else: the debt. People on the right who embrace the predestined adaptability of American democracy on environmental issues question it on fiscal ones. They have replaced fears of what dependence on overseas oil ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are palm trees on the esplanade but they are somewhat dog-eared, and the marina is not one where a self-respecting oligarch would want to moor his yacht. A new one is being built, to be run by the British firm Camper & Nicholsons; it will have houses – Nereids and Thetis Residences – built on artificial reefs, offering the inestimable advantage of being ...”

“... did. Heroism and hero-worship enact a similar orientation towards transcendent Fact, and so does self-forgetful labour, that ‘appeal from the Seen to the Unseen’ (‘laborare est orare’), which Carlyle describes as the only way for the unheroic to gain real as distinct from hypothetical knowledge. According to his notion of the feudal loyalty that ...”