“... was the son of a peer, and scrutinising the misbehaviour of toffs gave the gossip an extra shot of self-righteousness. ‘This is what our masters get up to’ has modulated into the present ‘public interest’ defence for showing knickerless celebrities getting into cars. Moral crusades were the way to sanction sex stories. In the 1920s, white slavery was a ...”

“... hand, generally zero in on the Bhagavad Gita (which many Hindus lift out of context and use as a self-contained sacred text); some also concentrate on the theology of Krishna and the other great god of the Mahabharata, Shiva, a darker and more violent god than Krishna. Smith translates three of the 18 chapters of the Gita (summarising the rest), and many of ...”

“... that, it encourages British governments to undertake military adventures which are usually futile, self-defeating and morally questionable. Some Conservatives have doubted the value of the ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent so light-heartedly renewed by Gordon Brown and to which, Downing Street tells us, he remains committed. But given what the deterrent ...”

“... by power as well as alienated. The diaries display what might be called the Yahweh syndrome, the self-imposed embargo on calling the supreme being by name. In Alan Clark’s diaries, Margaret Thatcher was invariably ‘The Lady’. Mullin, who on this evidence harbours fewer illusions about high office than most ex-ministers, refers to Blair simply as ‘The ...”

“... Hizbullah militias. At first, Grossman seems to have felt that the incursion was a limited act of self-defence, justified by Hizbullah’s cross-border attack in which three Israeli soldiers were killed and two kidnapped. But he soon changed his mind, and at a public meeting called for a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement. Two days later, the news came ...”

“... with the economics profession. The notion economists pushed – that markets are efficient and self-adjusting – gave comfort to regulators like Alan Greenspan, who didn’t believe in regulation in the first place. They provided support for the movement which stripped away the regulations that had provided the basis of financial stability in the decades ...”

“... to take pictures. The story is about a woman who can’t cope, and part of that failure – or her self-deceptive strategy for making it through the day – is to put herself in the third person, to become an onlooker. And sometimes the narrators tell themselves nothing at all, but even this is meaningful, as in ‘Certain Knowledge from Herodotus’: ‘These ...”

“... of the book: ‘It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.’ But for all the self-congratulation exhibited in this portentous exhortation, and in the sentimentality with which he briefly recounts the stories of individual victims, he fails in this task. To succeed, he would have needed to explore the lives of his emblematic victims in far ...”

“... faces frozen in the pain of having to endure death by a thousand photos with drunken self-made men and (as it turns out) crooks. Disorganised criminals, which is to say the vast majority of those who commit crime, live in a parallel social and cultural world which only intersects with our own when we are inconvenienced by it – the stolen ...”

“... To insist that those on benefits must fill the jobs freely available ‘out there’ is self-deception. There are few jobs ‘out there’. And there will be even fewer now. I doubt that the cuts have very much to do with the economy: if they did they would have been more plausible and less risky. It is very unlikely that Osborne, if asked, could ...”

“... Park with George, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and is arguably the closest Sondheim has come to a self-portrait. Being a mystery, or his own puzzle, is an inextricable part of Sondheim’s art. For all the pictures it contains, Finishing the Hat doesn’t give much sense of the life Sondheim has led on or off stage. He may have had love affairs but not one ...”

“... a decade later. Armed with a winning manner and what must have been deep reserves of moral self-confidence, she stalked her reluctant protagonists for months and sometimes years until they agreed to talk to her. What it took to win the trust of the family, and the redemptive results of her persistence, are important aspects of her investigation, as ...”

“... was listed as a target for pre-emptive attack in what Condoleezza Rice termed ‘anticipatory self-defence’. As one US official said to Seymour Hersh: ‘Don’t be distracted by all this talk of negotiations … they have a plan and they are going to get this guy after Iraq. He’s their version of Hitler.’ Such rhetoric may play well at home, but it ...”

“... cent of people are believed to experience it) or if it’s the other way round, and my wished-for self-imposed isolation exacerbates my response to noise. In any case, I’m loath to find I have a ‘condition’. Apart from anything else, it wouldn’t be normal, but it also wouldn’t be normal in a really annoying way that makes me a sufferer, rather than ...”

“... class’, inscribing themselves into the ethos of the Russian intelligentsia.* That act of self-inscription tells us a great deal about the way Soviet dissidents saw themselves. But should we accept this pedigree at face value? The more closely one inspects Bergman’s argument, the less persuasive it seems. The dissident movement did not recapitulate ...”