“... lack of US control is even more apparent in the provinces. Recently US and Iraqi commanders gave a self-congratulatory press conference on the situation in Baquba, the capital of the fruit-growing province of Diyala. ‘The situation in Baquba,’ they claimed, ‘is reassuring and under control’; nasty rumours, they said, were being ‘circulated by bad ...”

“... for. Jones is unafraid of simplicity, so his authorial knowingness comes across less as postmodern self-consciousness than as a proper metaphysical parenting of his characters. The stories are at once intensely controlled and loosely digressive, at once focused and a little awkward: Jones’s favourite mode is to centre his narrative on one character and then ...”

“... to leave written records of their lives, owe much to a Protestant tradition of agonised self-scrutiny, by no means reliably orthodox or complacent. They read the Bible with ‘piety but also with hunger, to discover God’s order, the architecture of His mind. They found a lot to puzzle about.’ Boston’s problem, as Munro sympathetically ...”

“... Olympia 52, Dimanche à Pékin, Les Statues meurent aussi and Lettre de Sibérie – were self-reflexive and had political undertones. It was Bazin who credited Marker with the invention of the essay-film, in which, he suggested, meanings and associations are produced not so much in the way that shots are stitched together as through the relationship ...”

“... millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign of his self-proclaimed unworthiness to share the fate of Jesus, than it was reinterpreted as a mark of his common sense. Even a poor fisherman knew that hanging head down brought the oblivion of unconsciousness much more quickly than the usual upright, and ...”

“... persistent troubles that Laplace encountered as a result of his somewhat lackadaisical, sometimes self-serving failure to cite the work of contemporaries and immediate predecessors adequately. Hahn has seemingly followed the advice once offered to Hawking: mathematical equations lower book sales. This restriction is severe. Previous books, notably ...”

“... with debtor nations, Mellon ‘did little and stayed quiet, still governed by his faith in the self-regulation of markets’. In 1930 and 1931, as the situation worsened, he continued to counsel inaction and spent more and more of his time on his art collection. ‘Buying pictures covertly from the Soviets captured his imagination in a way that presiding ...”

“... would rather have people ask why he had no statue than why he had one.’ When he came across some self-critical words of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – ‘there was a craving to be famous; and a horror of being known to like being known’ – he wrote in the margin: ‘This is me.’ So in the course of his life he turned down everything from ...”

“... road from Kabul through Jalalabad to the Khyber Pass and Pakistan. Admittedly, a strong sense of self-preservation led me to end my journey on the circular road at Ghazni, since between there and Kandahar the danger of attack is very much greater. As far as Ghazni, however, not only did the road seem to be safe enough, but as far as I could see the various ...”

“... from stories which make no claim to ‘truth’. ‘Dear reader,’ he wrote in a typically self-conscious style (and here I paraphrase), the story I am about to tell differs from Hamlet in that it is true. He went on: ‘I am a historian, not a writer of fiction, and have written the book in the conviction that the duty of a historian is to tell true ...”

“... Diaries presents Yeltsin’s view of this political double miracle. The book is an exercise in self-justification, but provides much revealing information along the way. Yeltsin is fairly candid about the factors which changed his fortunes in the first half of 1996. Early in the year he met with six of the oligarchs at their initiative. ‘We don’t have ...”

“... of being nothing more than an exhibition of ‘common sense’ or political correctness or elegant self-righteousness. By showing how difficult it is to argue well about equality – how dense the arguments have to be, how convoluted the examples – Dworkin succeeds in removing this most prominent value from that parade of amateurs. He explodes the platitudes ...”

“... an adult. Terah had been an even-handed father; the death of his wife sees him grow irascible and self-absorbed. Abram needs a wife, Terah hopes for grandchildren and he has few scruples about forcing Sarai into marriage: ‘you are different from my other children, apart from them, born from another womb.’ The offhand comment divides them – Sarai feels ...”

“... firms owning over 80 per cent of the market – did most of the damage to itself. The greatest self-inflicted wound came, as such things often do, in the form of a huge opportunity: the compact disc. The new medium was, from the cartel’s point of view, superbly expensive. At first this was because the technology was new and tricky; later, it was simply ...”

“... strikingly idiosyncratic, tirelessly careful for his people, but also for himself, even a little self-pitying. All the voices of Morebath are his voice. So this is the record of a personal tragedy. It was Trychay who introduced and built up the cult of St Sidwell, ensuring that her gilded image was equipped with silver shoes, Trychay who devoted twenty years ...”