“... survey from 2008, in which 80 per cent of the 94 residents asked favoured demolition. A subsequent self-conducted poll of 140 tenants found that 90 per cent favoured refurbishment. The council asserted that restoration was economically infeasible, and that with only 252 flats, the site was too valuable to justify such low population density. Refurbishment ...”

“... in global terms, than Lutheranism. Unlike Lutheranism, it had a decisive impact on that self-regarding complex of offshore European islands where the majority population spoke a distinctive language called English, especially when many of these people crossed the ocean to North America. There is little to criticise in Gordon’s assured account. I ...”

“... remark, which Christopher Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain boy.’ Griffith-Jones, who regularly advised the director of public prosecutions on ...”

“... rivals, France and Britain, but the Soviet Union, which was also a loose conglomerate of largely self-governing states, held precariously together by a number of factors of which force was perhaps the least important. The active collaboration of local elites, on which Kamen dwells at length, was clearly crucial, but there were other, more elusive cultural ...”

“... pornography, it often reads like it, but there is more to Platform than porn. Amid the cynicism, self-loathing and hermetic fucking, love emerges. It is hard to believe this could seem fresh: the story of a couple who start out interested in sex and end up loving each other is a familiar one in art and, indeed, life. Yet it does seem fresh. Perhaps this is ...”

“... increasingly towards Elizabeth’s imagined private as opposed to her well-documented public self, spiralling into speculations about a hidden love life – usually in terms of relations with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, or even Thomas Seymour, her abuser when she was 14. Once initiated, fantasies of this kind, which ...”

“... work of Philip Webb, as of those Arts and Crafts architects who were his disciples. Austerity and self-abnegation are its hallmarks. You cannot relish Webb’s buildings without a feeling for puritanism. His was a life shot through with refusals: he would not compete, would not publish, would not join clubs and societies, would not marry, would not take fees ...”

“... night. There were armchairs between the racks. As one B&N publicity statement put it (intending self-praise), these were ‘amusement parks for the mind’. Sad people would virtually live there, phantoms of the bookshop. There were in-store play areas for children, while their parents shopped for the books that would give their offspring a head-start in ...”

“... here? This is Homes’s first novel in six years, and her penetrating critique has given way to self-help truisms: ‘There is no VIP room in reality . . . You can’t Google the answers.’ Feral chihuahuas would have been sharp ten years ago; now, with every C-list starlet toting a teacup Tinkerbell, it’s so plausible it’s ...”

“... Oslo negotiations in 1991, all the Palestinians could hope for in the short run was an ‘interim self-governing authority’. That is what they got in the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s, and is all they have today. Sovereignty was excluded then, and it is still withheld by Israel and the US on the classic colonial grounds that the Palestinians have not yet ...”

“... of reference, the cartoonishness of some of his characters – and the unmistakable mood of self-congratulation. There’s also the fact that Rushdie has never mastered one of the most basic elements of storytelling, how to orient and grip an audience. The Satanic Verses was often accused, along with everything else, of being unreadable, something which ...”

“... hidden last-minute talk between Chamberlain and Goering), the verse also conveys something of the self-contained world of MI5. There is no word in these diaries about any of the war’s turning points – Churchill’s takeover, the German attack on Russia, Pearl Harbor – or anything personal. Yet Liddell was a considerable man in every way. After winning ...”

“... French trouvères, Italian stilnovisti, German Minnesinger – cultivated an intense artistic self-consciousness. They were the first vernacular poets to forgo anonymity: their songs were painstakingly collected in chansonniers, manuscripts variously furnished with illuminations, music, even fanciful biographies of the poets. In English, by ...”

“... moments, when Tilly lets us know something about his own life without any of the modern jargon of self-exposure. Tracing what he calls his ‘line of argument’ back through American pragmatism, Why? shows the very real advantages of not talking psychologically when one is most tempted to do so. Tilly’s shorthand for this approach is to quote the great ...”

“... owed more to Renaissance notions of sprezzatura than to bourgeois calculations of collective self-interest. Lilti also portrays the salons as places where one did more than just cold-bloodedly exchange ideas according to the precepts of Habermasian rationality: in salons, people ate, drank, sang, gambled, flirted and seduced within the framework of what ...”