“... hard-working. But she was too short, her legs were too thick, and she was perhaps too brittle and self-conscious to lose herself in a role. Then, on 15 November 1949, bitterly aware that she would never be anything more than ‘a crumb on the banquet table of MGM’, Nancy Davis wangled a date with Ronald Wilson Reagan. For more than two years, however, the ...”

“... result of extremely hard work, not just practising writing but getting writing into contact with a self-understanding that took a long time to achieve. He confessed the relative weakness of his early work, its tendency towards ‘literary’ decorativeness, and often emphasised the sheer technical difficulty of describing what is under your nose. He believed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and reacts with a rush of bullying moral anger – three-quarters of which is really obscure self-hatred. Worthen’s exposition is finely done till, by such a slide as I mentioned, it crosses the borderline into biographical speculation. Such experiences were, we can guess, among the painful discoveries which Croydon brought Lawrence, as he endeavoured ...”

“... is rendered chic by his gaze ... This was a Hollywood device during the great days of American self-flattery ... not a King but a whole nation was served the visible world on a platter, as if it were perfectly baked and glazed.’ The parallels Hollander draws make you see paintings and movies a little differently – and that little unglazes the eye to a ...”

“... of Lacan all along the line: he takes exception, for one thing, to Lacan’s ‘gloating, self-righteous “not-I-but-the-signifier” refrain’, which he likens to ‘the language of fundamentalism’ in seeming to impose a ‘supra-human authority’ on us as poor Speaking Subjects; and he seconds some of the arguments used by feminists against ...”

“... some nominated other. The challenge for the authors of Class War: A Decade of Disorder, as self-appointed bailiffs of a vanishing tribe, is to publish something more meaningful than a cover version of the rancid tabloids they so obviously model themselves upon. It is perhaps worth making it clear that Class War came into being as a loose federation of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... schoolchildren and students entering adult literacy. But a good proportion must also be reaching self-improving readers. One of the weaknesses of the Orwellian model is its assumption that readers remain true to their class patterns all their lives. Many readers who like to think of themselves as cultivated will, I suspect, have followed the same sort of ...”