“... of social policy as taught in Britain hardly touches on such issues, to say nothing about the self-satisfaction of inefficient bureaucracies. But to return to finance, there is obviously some awareness in these books of the difficulties with which the welfare state is faced. It is uneven. The book edited by Timothy Booth, Planning for Welfare, contains a ...”

“... called out the totals, and Mitch gnawed his fingernails like a starving cannibal reduced to self-consumption. Mitch had taken £14 10s 3d, Ray £18 4s 9d and myself £19 1s 3d. The following week was my last on the job. Aware of this fact, Ray and Mitch competed fiercely to exceed my takings, while I responded eagerly to the challenge. We ran, literally ...”

“... obscure impulse remains of historical significance. It may not matter much whether there were real self-confessed Ranters and Ranter Meetings or not. But it seems improbable that the Ranters were invented simultaneously by Fox, Bunyan, Baxter, Muggleton, Reeve and scores of others only to advance their own sectarian disciplinary purposes; nor in order to ...”

“... for good. ‘The promotion I earned that summer, from axeman to rodman, had done more for my self-esteem than any number of inherited titles.’ The matter of inherited titles is an important one in George Ignatieff’s book, as is the family tradition of public service which got the Ignatieffs their estates and their title. His ...”

“... into new poetic territory from this enthusiastically written book. Perkins is at times forced into self-parody: ‘Except for her poetry and madness, Anne Sexton (1928-74), née Harvey, lived as a suburban housewife.’ But he does his best to enliven things with biographical vignettes. The revelation that John Ashbery was a radio Quiz Kid at the age of 14 ...”

“... able to explain the gradual mutation of the expectant city of the mid-Seventies into the mediocre, self-conscious city of the end of the decade.’ This is a complaint often made about Barcelona: as long as Franco was alive, it was a centre of resistance, radical, cosmopolitan, connected to Europe when the rest of Spain was not. When Franco died, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nothing in the text to distinguish it from dozens of others scripted in the uniquely flatulent, self-congratulatory style of the late Brezhnev period.’ Yeltsin’s real test is yet to come. In the case of the man he finally succeeded in pushing out of office, Mikhail Gorbachev, the dossier is probably more or less complete. For a long time, Gorbachev was ...”

“... once and for all the difficulties of his own nature. He had thought until then that he was self-sufficient, and he was not.’ The poems are so open, and yet, as Callow says, ‘he was a sly old man. Fiction, lying concealment, doubleness – that was the approach he favoured.’ ‘They used to say,’ he once told Horace Traubel, ‘that all the ...”

“... Such things were greatly liked. In all this it can and should be said that Maclean’s tact and self-confidence, qualities which may rather seldom march together, were insistently available at the diplomatic-political level that counted, which was the level of Tito and his closest men, and may have been crucial at several ticklish points in liaison between ...”

“... respect at all,’ his friend, Vic Francis, admitted. ‘He needed to make conquests, for his own self-esteem – but he had no respect for women, and would not put on any airs or pretensions for them.’ Jack had, indeed, no patience with women who made demands or difficulties. ‘Fuck these women and let’s get some others,’ he wrote to his closest ...”

“... fuss. The inquest produced a tidy, emollient version, which the coroner accepted. It had been self-defence, said the two witnesses, whose names were Skeres and Poley. Marlowe and Frizer had quarrelled over the bill, or reckoning. Marlowe had picked up Frizer’s dagger and slashed at him, Frizer had wrested it away (presumably while the witnesses stood as ...”

“... research terrorist organisations. As he himself puts it, ‘this is an area of lies, deception and self-deception,’ with the inherent and ever-present personal danger of having to ask too many uncomfortable questions of those whose life’s work is to kill people. I recall a comment made by a member of a Loyalist paramilitary group to a journalist friend of ...”

“... and courtiers who advise the sovereign can be forgiven for defending the monarchy so zealously and self-interestedly. Less excusable is the behaviour of the civil servants, especially Treasury grandees, whose job is supposedly to monitor public spending. But all too often, Hall claims, they have been only too eager to accommodate the sovereign’s ...”

“... a private record of his spiritual experience. but one carefully selected by its subject for use in self-instruction. Others like Pliny provide us with letters, but only those written or selected for publication by the author, with the aim of impressing and instructing others. Mitchell has not, however, written a complete biography. As his title suggests, his ...”