“... for weeks on end. And Benji’s father, it eventually transpires, is a violent drunk. There’s no self-pity in the way Benji tells it. His dominant feeling, when his father is on a bender, is embarrassment. He shuts the windows and hopes the neighbours won’t hear: time to put up the barricades. Benji and Reggie have an older sister. ‘I haven’t talked ...”

“... defences of his work so they could pass them off as their own. And he could appear remarkably self-important: in a lecture on Tocqueville, he noted how impressive it was that in some of his views on the paradoxes of freedom and equality, ‘Tocqueville anticipated me.’ These quirky and revealing writings show that Popper was not as consistent as he ...”

“... permanently aggrieved sense of having to operate in a hostile institutional environment became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The British civil service may have many failings, but if you want to deliver lasting change it is the only instrument that can do it for you. Blair treated the administrative machinery of the UK state as though he really were in ...”

“... of the report by the Major government – which took seven days to digest the report and prepare self-serving press briefings, while Robin Cook, the shadow foreign secretary, was given three hours – made it possible for the government to weather the storm. No one resigned, despite Scott’s explicit finding – explicit, but buried in four volumes and 1800 ...”

“... never more bombastic than in reports of the defeat at Stalingrad – on the need for self-sacrifice to keep Germany from going under. Stargardt claims that his book ‘offers a very different understanding of the effects that wartime defeats and crises had on German society’ from that offered by previous historians. The approach he adopts ...”

“... was its civilisational birthright and heritage – a position of pre-eminence in world affairs. Self-belief of this sort has always been a feature of Chinese thinking. But during Mao’s early years in power, the notion that China could make progress only by adopting imported ideas was still a relatively new and radical concept. As recently as the late 18th ...”

“... only wanted to kiss the throats of women, and who only wanted peace’. Sam may be ridiculously self-obsessed but we tuck him in and turn off the light. Keith’s summer job means he ends up meeting his intellectual hero, Morris Binkel. Keith wants Binkel to say he sees something in him. What he does say is: ‘Even the most mediocre mediocrity can make a ...”

“... Then the Gothic triumphed again with the birth of Romanticism, which began in England, ‘this self-sufficient island kingdom’, where ‘the Germanic character had not allowed itself to be overrun.’ As a critic Muthesius was more subtle. The architects he singled out, Norman Shaw and Baillie Scott, Mackintosh and the very young Lutyens among them, are ...”

“... to publish it as soon as possible: Tony Blair’s topicality is on the wane. The Ghost is self-consciously concerned with the logic of publicity and sales, the pressure to get the former prime minister’s memoirs out there as soon as possible. It also acknowledges the short shelf-life of most satire. Discussing an old Cambridge Footlights comic ...”

“... job helped you not only to learn practical skills such as arb, but also to witness the exercise of self-discipline. Traders could assess whether a clerk or runner who wanted to start trading was the kind of person it might be worth backing financially. Chicago’s tightly-knit neighbourhoods seem to have helped, by providing recruits who would already be known ...”

“... problem. This is one short section in a book that, industry by industry, systematically uncovers self-servingness wherever it exists. But Dorothy’s experiments in efficiency come about partly as a reaction to the weakness of her husband, a gentleman farmer of the old school who doesn’t like to see animals suffer. She realised something had to be done on ...”

“... Twickenham, 1954 The New Zealanders handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great ...”

“... give me a power of control over her, even if I had known how to exercise it. I trace these lines, self-distrustfully, with the shadows of after-events darkening the very paper I write on; and still I say, what could I do? Of course he helps her. What Victorian man of feeling wouldn’t? But there’s something odd here, not apparent on a first reading, about ...”

“... Too often iconic buildings are asked somehow to stand in for the civic realm, as if imagistic self-promotion were all that citizens can safely expect from politicians and designers today. Rogers, like Foster and Piano (with whom, for better or worse, he will always be triangulated), emerged in the interregnum between the engineered abstraction of modern ...”

“... the UN for everything.’ And these are people who lost everything in the course of a struggle for self-determination. Do not think it was lost on us that the Kenyans, and every international body that monitors or provides for the displaced, customarily places its refugees in the least desirable regions on earth. There we become utterly dependent – unable ...”