“... face fell. He’d wanted the Nobel Peace Prize.’ He ran the Government in a wholly self-indulgent manner, and had little idea about peacetime problems, saying, for example, of his time as Chancellor under Baldwin: ‘I was Chancellor of the Exchequer . . . for five years and . . . I never understood it.’ Not long before leaving office he ...”

“... culture intersect and his study shows the possibility of escape from the enclosed and self-conscious boundaries of strict ethnicity – it might even make Reginald Byron cheer up a bit. Wall is more concerned with what a writer chooses as subject-matter than with where he or she is from. He discusses the work of writers from a great variety of ...”

“... His charm and conversation were praised by his contemporaries, and he was certainly pretty if the self-portraits are true, but it is hard to put together a personality for him. The quotations from Bellori given in the catalogue amount to a success story in which the hero is more or less a cipher. He married Mary Ruthven, a Scottish lady-in-waiting, in ...”

“... us that in his early years Fuller wrote a ‘very attractive’ book on Aleister Crowley, the self-styled Beast 666. Visiting politicians include the Liberal Lord Beauchamp, whom Fothergill to his dismay overcharges for a consignment of hock. It was Beauchamp who in 1931 suddenly resigned all his offices and went to live abroad, having been threatened ...”

“... the Liberator much more interesting than her English doctor husband. As a general he was entirely self-taught. Harvey’s blow-by-blow description of his campaigns, especially the early ones, reveals mistakes, muddles, foolish tactical decisions, disastrous setbacks and defeats. Bolívar was indomitable, however. ‘Always great, he was greatest in ...”

“... National Accord, one of the members of the Governing Council, had been set on fire. There is a self-defeating crudity about the occupation’s methods. US troops routinely tie up those they detain, force them to lie on the ground and put bags over their heads. Saddam Hussein should not have been a hard act to follow. Iraqis know that he ruined their ...”

“... be tailed, and catastrophe ensued. At his trial in 1987, Barbie claimed that Moulin died from self-inflicted wounds, which is not unthinkable – he had after all tried to take his life in June 1940 and a number of resisters did choose to kill themselves rather than betray their friends. (Although the Nazis interned but did not ordinarily molest French ...”

“... to find the switch. A telling passage which seems to belong more to the inspirational world of self-help and dieting manuals than to a book concerned with scientific data informs us that ‘at the heart of the story are the people whose lives are bound by their struggle with weight. It is their stories – the eminently human ones – that are the common ...”

“... another moment, his last in fact, the dying man is hopeful, as he calls out to a former artistic self who is also, always, a future one in the making: ‘that Youth who could do ...”

“... own excuses, is more tangled. Taubman refers to his ‘stunning blend of deception and self-deception’. He never admitted that he had obeyed Stalin out of fear, though fear must have played a part. (Back in 1923 he had briefly joined a Trotskyist opposition group in the Donbas, the sort of mistake which cost thousands of people their lives. He ...”

“... Mugabe and his like fought for a ‘scientific socialism’ which turned out to be a cover for self-enrichment and authoritarianism. The one thing both sides had in common was their contempt for democracy. Ignorant armies clashed by night and Mhanda – bravely, naively – led one of those armies until his usefulness was over because he hadn’t ...”

“... and its Kabul ‘puppet’ suffered total defeat. In doing so, the US flouted not only its own self-interest (regional stability) but also the Geneva Accords which it had signed in 1988. Why, once a Soviet withdrawal was on offer and had even begun, Washington energetically promoted Islamist violence in Afghanistan, at the same time as spending a second ...”

“... what may seem to be a certain naivety in Kraus’s views. The ‘forms of human culture . . . were self-evidently true if they had the blessing of language, that language of which he naively believed that it could say everything worth saying, and was incapable of deceiving him who spoke it truthfully.’ To believe that language can say everything worth saying ...”

“... were written for the people. He taught the French to mistrust the privileged fleur-de-lis, the self-serving Phrygian cap of the French Revolution and the Second Empire’s imperial bee, and to prefer instead the awkward, unkillable cockerel. What he described in fact was not Frenchness at all, but a simple generosity of spirit. His heroes have travelled ...”

“... meeting-group of intellectuals. Gathered around a full table, covered with a white tablecloth and self-brewed coffee, the assembled people tearfully honoured their fallen colleagues and praised the great event of being able to sit together, look at the white tablecloth, and talk to each other like human beings . . . And the human beings suddenly felt like ...”