“... decently fatherly but inconsequential letters addressed to his own younger, apparently scapegrace self, even though he promises us in his florid introduction that the Nabokov archive which he presides over will yield at least one more volume of letters, addressed to ‘émigré literary figures, his parents and his wife’. The trifles from that future volume ...”

“... York Times and the Washington Post are magnificent, if lonely achievements, they are also prone to self-importance and full of acres of leaden prose – the deliberately dull reportage of ethical journalism. In that context someone like Hitchens shines forth like a naughty deed on a grey day. Hitchens appears to best advantage in Prepared for the worst, a ...”

“... the literature of moral philosophy. She links this account in interesting ways to a conception of self-determination and autonomy, and, in a long final chapter, she makes some intriguing suggestions about the implications of her account for democratic theory. Along the way, she has significant discussions of many issues, including an excellent treatment of ...”

“... and how the failings of Italy’s transport infrastructure encouraged the creation of more self-sufficient steel mini-mills. Britain’s relative decline has been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of books. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the analysis here is often both familiar and at first glance deeply depressing. The examples cited of ...”

“... who despised Kane and wrote that he was ‘peevish, coarse, sometimes insulting ... the most self-conceited man I ever saw.’ Berton’s purpose is not to debunk heroes and heroism, but he knows that under sustained pressure (duration is crucial here, and was a crucial element in all 19th-century explorations – most expeditions took years rather than ...”

“... Of power, of honour and omnipotence’. And it is implicit throughout the whole disappointing, self-gratifying rigmarole of Faustus as magus. The ‘demi-god’ magician proves to be a charlatan after all: a seeker of material power who, in his own words, ‘aims at nothing but external trash’. In the context of the 1590s, this can be read as a cynical ...”

“... could you expect anyone in my position to bother with that?’ He even volunteered an apparently self-damning description of the dying moments of the old regime when it was clear that the revolution would succeed. ‘Someone asked me,’ said a broadly-grinning Nicu in his evidence, ‘what we should do. I told him that it was everyone for himself: Pack your ...”

“... own instincts, without thought of the effects in consequential cases, is a dangerous maverick, his self-indulgence promoting confusion. Lord Denning was a judge in the High Court from 1944 to 1948, in the Court of Appeal from 1948 to 1957, in the House of Lords from 1957 to 1962, and returned to preside over the Court of Appeal as Master of the Rolls from 1962 ...”

“... World. Alongside the rapacious ambition to discover lost cities of gold, there ran a perpetual, self-defeating desire for encounters with a special sort of other, impossibly defined and therefore never met. These strangers had to be sufficiently like Europeans (in terms of monarchy, street-plans, polite society) to command respect; tough enough to withstand ...”

“... steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant art-historically, but it does look very good. The second room is Gallery 12 nearby, diagonally traversed by Dan Flavin’s 1968 piece, knee high and fifty-odd feet long, coolly dazzling ...”

“... that bourgeois liberal society still expects propriety from artists who are paid millions to be self-consciously eccentric? How could it be that M. Allen and Mme Farrow did not observe the distinction between essential and contingent loves? Had they no operative concepts of freedom and commitment; did their commitment not entail mutual honesty, and how was ...”

“... early in World War Two. Jones is portrayed as highly competent, but also as devious and prone to self-deception. Reuters in 1989 made a profit as we have seen of £180m, compared with a 1985 profit of £55m. Two thirds of the staff by then were economic journalists. Many were foreign. During the Falklands War, Rear-Admiral William Ash, on censorship ...”

“... chief engineer respectively, were men in the Soviet manager mould: proud of their hardwon skills, self-confident, harsh and intolerant. The station was grossly overmanned, as was everything else, in order to sop up surplus labour. The solution was to adopt the common Soviet practice of developing an inner core of personnel who did the work and an outer core ...”

“... something akin to the desk of shame in the North Library where degenerates and potential self-abusers are condemned to sit. We have seen the BL’s future – will it work? No, it won’t. Or, more precisely, if anyone thinks that using BL 2000 will involve no more than walking half a mile north and having access to some fiendishly useful ...”

“... finds nothing to be admired, considers discontent a mark of worldy wisdom, is too cynical for self-respect and too dull-witted and purblind to be truly cynical. He could be pertinacious and merciless in revenge, brave at bay, perhaps generous on impulse. A Cornishman, a gentleman, and miserable. Figures seen with this super-real vividness inhabit the ...”