“... City, a confidently exclusive little clique. Jeanne MacKenzie’s early chapters pullulate with self-deprecating Adonises and dark-haired lustrous beauties, and she seems respectfully incurious about events below the belt, tempting the reader to side with the sansculottes ... But when they rush off to war – all professing knightly devotion to Diana Duff ...”

“... was sharply put down by Mr Justice Bridge. The injuries, the judge concluded, had probably been ‘self-inflicted’. ‘It is quite apparent,’ he explained, ‘that some scratching type of discolouration upon the chest is a very easy mark for a man to produce on his own body.’ There were also the consistent and passionate denials of all six defendants ...”

“... something to be a fact, there is an entire apparatus at their disposal for proving it to be so: self-seeking accusers, suggestible or imaginative witnesses, broken suspects, the power to give credit to what supports the hypothesis and to rubbish what controverts it. Our adversarial system of criminal justice has a mass of safeguards against the technical ...”

“... well knowing that his personal clockwork was like that of nobody else. A black sheep redeeming him-self in history’s eye? A ‘little man on the make’? The chosen instrument of the God of Battles? Or just a very good professional soldier – touched intermittently by genius? This uncommonly readable book could have been trimmed of a few ...”

“... literature has really ‘come of age’ in the sense of being completely independent and self-reliant. My answer would be not quite, but nearly so. Its first writers were English, Scots or Irish transferred to alien shores and naturally looking to Great Britain for their audience. In this they were followed by the first generation of writers born in ...”

“... in a way which is pertinent to irony as preternatural vigilance, when he lets enter his engaging self. ‘The awkward dodging to left and to right when two people meet in the street’ was unmasked (unpersuasively, it seems) by Freud as erotic of purpose. ‘The last time I engaged in the act, the other person was a large policeman.’ So? But no. End of ...”

“... and ‘reality’, implying that they are self-evident absolutes which any ordinary person will take for granted. To make matters worse, he uses favoured terminology inconsistently (Stanley Fish claimed to find 17 different meanings for the word ‘division’ in Bayley’s book The Uses of ...”

“... or genocide were being committed. Unlike the EU and other regional bodies bound by economic self-interest, the AU was an exercise in sentiment and aspiration – the embodiment of an impulse towards unity. The high hopes of the independence years were revived, with judicious amnesia. At the founding OAU summit, the Togolese putschist Gnassingbé ...”

“... knew it who is disappearing. Those who are older than they are young make exaggeratedly impatient, self-deprecating jokes when they forget a name, a face or why it was they walked into a room. (Recent research from Notre Dame suggests that it may be passing through doorways which unframes the thought you had the second before – but I’ve just forgotten the ...”

“... in mining overseas. Jobs dismissed him to Isaacson as a ‘con man’, but their careers – from self-discovery to charismatic leadership to great wealth – bear out the similarities between them that friends noticed at Reed. Before the string of product hits that began in 1998 – iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad – Jobs had a few lost years. In 1983, he ...”

“... which is in turn causing the predicament of governments to intensify, as confidence sinks and the self-fulfilling expectations of a second downturn take hold. This in turn puts pressure on expectations about governments’ abilities to repay their debts, which further lowers confidence, and so on. It’s starting to look as if the best-case scenario for the ...”

“... government that returned in 1973. But even if Juan Carlos’s resolve was partly inspired by self-interest, at least he had enough sense to see that his own fate depended on a civilian government. If the king’s opposition undermined the rebellion, what snuffed it out was the inertia of the military elite. Each of the country’s 11 military governors ...”

“... This was one theory. She found something saintly and crazed in his undertaking, an element of self-denial, an element of penance. Sit in the dark, revere the images. Were his parents Catholic?’ It’s a good question, and a hard one not to ask about the author as well (they were) because DeLillo’s constant recourse to religious language to describe ...”

“... exercised in physics. This is not least because it needs to have a significant element of self-consciousness, making the identity of the ‘we’ who are engaged in reflecting an unavoidable focus of that reflection. We need to see metaphysics as an enterprise that is completely different from any of the natural sciences, an enterprise that, unlike ...”

“... participate, and the only honest artistic register of its glare seems to be some form of gnarled, self-conscious, confrontational ...”