“... from other oil companies, Coll writes, ‘tended to regard their Exxon cousins as ruthless, self-isolating and inscrutable, but also as priggish Presbyterian deacons who proselytised the Sunday school creed Rockefeller had lived by: “We don’t smoke; we don’t chew; we don’t hang with those who do.”’ One executive, Coll writes, was startled to ...”

“... bit-part who doesn’t know when he should leave the stage. While he is subject to fantasies of self-betterment, he’s also a disquieting parody of those fantasies – and a reminder of what they might cost. In Sketches by Boz, ‘progress’ is used in a Hogarthian, not a Victorian sense: ‘one of our principal amusements is to watch the gradual progress ...”

“... have surrendered. Those who are under thirty, and less persistent than Snowden in their efforts of self-education, can hardly remember a time when things were different. The year 2008 brought a remission for Snowden, because the Obama campaign promised a turn away from the national security state and the surveillance regime. He cherished the warmest hopes for ...”

“... which Shapiro shares a few kisses and a grope with a woman he met on the plane, then cringes with self-loathing as a Hasid walks past him: ‘I realised … that without earlocks and a ritual garment one cannot be a real Jew … Had I worn such an outfit that night I wouldn’t have been exposed to those temptations.’ Lasdun didn’t return to the faith of ...”

“... Some suggest that there will never be a ‘DSM-6’, on the grounds that the whole endeavour is self-destructing. Don’t count on it. It is on the contrary likely that the manual will become more attuned to neurological causes as these gradually conquer more and more of psychiatry. The DSM is a living, organic creature, kept alive by myriad worker bees. At ...”

“... against corruption at the Bolshoi.’ Lunkina herself left the theatre last September, to live in self-imposed exile in Ontario with her husband, the producer Vladislav Moskalev, and their children. Threats connected to Moskalev’s business dealings prompted the move. Moskalev had his own hypothesis about the attack on Filin. In his view, it stemmed from ...”

“... themselves in court, seek to resolve issues by themselves, pay for services which support self-resolution, pay for private representation or decide not to tackle the issue at all’.* This is an argument not for modifying or reducing legal aid but for abolishing it, something the Treasury has wished it could do for half a century, but which the ...”

“... of the usurers. A Russian who is trained in a Western company starts to think differently: self-love is at the root of Western rationality. That is not our way. You have been sending us your consumer culture. I don’t think of Washington or London as being in charge. Satan commands them. That is why you want to bomb Syria, the homeland of ...”

“... Two independent teams used the refurbished Hubble to study supernovae, cataclysmic explosions from self-destructive stars that can temporarily outshine entire galaxies. Their data, first announced in 1998, reversed decades of expectations by suggesting that our universe isn’t just getting bigger; it’s getting bigger faster. To reconcile their robust ...”

“... an emotional nowhere – from which Ensslin in all her craziness and vulnerability and courage and self-righteousness could then emerge, to address us, to stand opposite and laugh. The two later Oppositions, I sometimes think, are the only pictures of people done in our time that the future will care to look at – though not for long. They are Géricault’s ...”

“... responds to the Italian’s hyperbolic authority. Turner​ insists that this streak of parody and self-parody stems from more than simple anxiety of influence or difference in artistic temperament. ‘Dante is a poet of truth,’ theological and political, she writes, who stakes his claim to greatness on that truth, whereas Chaucer, like Ovid, ‘suggests ...”

“... the pale crescents splashed across their chests crack open. Your heart stops a little at a self-disclosure as effusive as a star shell bursting or a flag shaken out. The loveliness is so casual.Of course, they’re not performing for us. They don’t hold back, as they wrestle and swipe, or gnaw savagely at an exposed bit of neck or shoulder. Yet they ...”

“... and he left a project concerning the Occupied Territories unfinished at his death. A Polaroid self-portrait (1973) In the end Hamilton was animated by this tension above all: even as he embraced the postwar world of spectacle, he aimed to ‘open up an apparently seamless media image or event to analysis through a variety of print media and painting ...”

“... staff was that the conventional story of Nolde’s survival under National Socialism was a self-serving postwar myth. His paintings reflected not only his ‘emotional response to the world about him’, but a profoundly troubling nationalist and antisemitic politics. And the National Gallery in Berlin was planning a blockbuster exhibition to expose ...”

“... Once he had recognised this last feeling, he congratulated himself. But then, the sensation of self-approval was also confusing.‘It’s a bit difficult here when you have a passenger to see the traffic coming in from the right.’‘It’s impossible,’ said Chiara but drove on giving no quarter.He sat there, hunched and disconcerted, surreptitiously ...”