“... hounds and loyal mediocrities, with the latter preponderating over time. Compared to this, the self-conscious embrace of elitist methods of selection looks positively attractive, especially if ways could be found to inject some political responsiveness into the selection process. Consider the way the Germans handle an analogous problem. Their ...”

“... keep things going. Existentialism turns such thoughts into fear and trembling, but also a kind of self-loathing. Yet even here there is a strange play between the Promethean and the Orphic. There may be a physicist’s response to the wonder (or dread) of existence, and I do not mean the much touted idea of a Big Bang when everything came into being. The ...”

“... with censorship becoming a vital part of the emergency powers, thereby rendering neutrality self-sustaining. At the same time, the need to justify Ireland’s stance saw the emergence of sophisticated moral and political arguments in favour of neutrality. Fine Gael’s readiness to toe the government’s line helped greatly. Neutrality also needed to be ...”

“... to be convinced that he had a heart after all. Maybe Blair will end his term with a similarly self-serving expression of ...”

“... strictly necessary to leading a modest existence. His first wife, Lucretia, was such a miracle of self-abnegation and anxious piety that had she not died from consumption she would surely have perished from excessive virtue. William was saved from this life of hair-shirtedness by Emily, his more worldly and practical second wife (and Eleanor’s ...”

“... through the glass ceiling ‘by sheer character and initiative’, that rarity for her age, a self-made woman. She was a mature 26 when she agreed to marry Henry, over 30 when the marriage was consummated, well beyond the normal age of first wedlock for aristocratic women. Her mind, her religion, her tastes, are all subjects with some depth to them, and ...”

“... a lot in common with, for example, Chris Moyles. Moyles is the BBC Radio 1 breakfast DJ – the self-styled Saviour of Radio 1 – who has just published a volume of memoirs, The Gospel According to Chris Moyles.* I’m not going to compare the book to Dylan’s Chronicles: Moyles’s book is one of the worst I have ever read, and Dylan’s is one of the ...”

“... refused to renew the station’s public licence, though it remains online. The opposition was also self-pityingly silly to boycott the assembly elections at the end of 2005. But it may not be impotent for ever. Its more sensible members, like the provincial governor who stood against Chávez last December, see that the poor have now to be included, and only 15 ...”

“... side bellows: ‘Facciamo i nostri morti’ (‘Let’s kill too’). Killing is always a powerful self-affirmation, however inoffensive the victim. These scenes are persuasive vehicles for Saviano’s message, and throughout the film the ugliness and poverty of people’s homes, the clashing colours of their cheap clothes, the squalor of the public ...”

“... different this time is that no one expects new technologies to be democratic or to encourage ‘self-reliance and non-violence’, as AT was supposed to. Perhaps that’s just as well. The rebels of the East Village eventually gave up on their windmill because it required too much maintenance. Geodesic domes, too, failed to live up to their promise. The ...”

“... This was evident in the way the crowds behaved: the emphatic unity of the people, their creative self-organisation and improvised forms of protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline. Picture the march: thousands of men and women demonstrating in complete silence. This was a genuine popular uprising on the part of the deceived partisans of the ...”

“... by power as well as alienated. The diaries display what might be called the Yahweh syndrome, the self-imposed embargo on calling the supreme being by name. In Alan Clark’s diaries, Margaret Thatcher was invariably ‘The Lady’. Mullin, who on this evidence harbours fewer illusions about high office than most ex-ministers, refers to Blair simply as ‘The ...”

“... that, it encourages British governments to undertake military adventures which are usually futile, self-defeating and morally questionable. Some Conservatives have doubted the value of the ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent so light-heartedly renewed by Gordon Brown and to which, Downing Street tells us, he remains committed. But given what the deterrent ...”

“... hand, generally zero in on the Bhagavad Gita (which many Hindus lift out of context and use as a self-contained sacred text); some also concentrate on the theology of Krishna and the other great god of the Mahabharata, Shiva, a darker and more violent god than Krishna. Smith translates three of the 18 chapters of the Gita (summarising the rest), and many of ...”

“... was the son of a peer, and scrutinising the misbehaviour of toffs gave the gossip an extra shot of self-righteousness. ‘This is what our masters get up to’ has modulated into the present ‘public interest’ defence for showing knickerless celebrities getting into cars. Moral crusades were the way to sanction sex stories. In the 1920s, white slavery was a ...”