“... for her (successful) audition for drama school, and so on and on and on. The errors and haste and self-regarding irrelevancies would be forgivable if there were some real muscle under all the cellulite, but Cash never decides what his book’s actually about. It’s a ‘detective investigation into fact and fiction’ in Greene’s work (and how we tire of ...”

“... leader to praise Syria’s leader as a man who had made his country strong, independent and self-confident was strange enough. For President Asad to have called the Prime Minister-elect a ‘strong and honest’ man who could deliver peace with Syria was extraordinary. Seale was amused to note that Barak likes to doodle when speaking, illustrating his ...”

“... did not care.’ We were ‘stooges’, deceived ‘because we wanted to be’. There is too much self-flagellation here. It does not go without saying that the Volga Germans were no real danger. The greatest war in history was raging; loss of the line of the Volga might well have meant defeat. Nazi armies were doing far worse things on Russian ...”

“... of going beyond thought. ‘There is no other way,’ wrote Ashbery with bitter accuracy in his ‘Self Portrait’,                             and those assholes Who would confuse everything with their mirror games Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or At least confuse issues by means of an investing Aura that would ...”

“... certainly a goodly number fashioned from whole cloth. The inventions and embroiderings were not self-aggrandising but meant only to amuse. Alldritt exhibits some canniness in his siftings and winnowings. Bunting always thought of himself first and foremost as a Northumbrian man. His mother’s father was a mining engineer and colliery manager from ...”

“... the Congress Party, not to be confused with the person Indira Gandhi, who could be civilised and self-deprecating with the best of them, distancing herself with a smile and an elegant shrug of her shoulders from the flood of panegyric which her fawning courtiers chose to lavish upon her. At another level, this enigmatic person, omnivorous autocrat and ...”

“... Scottish control of the trade to England was a valuable source of revenue. Scots have long held self-congratulatory beliefs about their educational system. It is claimed that in the 18th and 19th centuries it was a bond, with all social classes using the parish school, and at the same time a source of social mobility so far as it enabled the ‘lad ...”

“... with the early poetry: ‘honest, loveless, childhood Peter’, the poet dogged by bad-luck and self-disgust. In this area, there is little of Larkin’s saving humour. The dominant note is anger and envy: To be above the tearing fingers of the ruck You need good teeth, a good income, good luck. There is something so persistent in the rage that it becomes ...”

“... Nevertheless, strong government and the economic recovery it might bring with it are not self-evidently ends in themselves. Schumpeter was no doubt right, he certainly cleared the air, in saying that ‘socialism’ is whatever works economically to the larger advantage. But he was disingenuous in also claiming that it was culturally ...”

“... the dogma of ‘consensus’, which in its turn is another aspect of the whole system’s loss of self-confidence. Newspapers which once cheered or booed the rival teams as they contended now conceive the football ground itself to be in need of defence. Evil men are crawling forward, determined to tear up the weedy old turf. Scargill, Benn, Ken ...”

“... politics also flourish in an urban milieu, would have been much more appropriate. Despite his self-censorship, however, Lacey does succeed in conveying much more of Saudi Arabia’s complex reality than Richard Johns. He understands that, in a mainly oral culture, ‘facts’ are secondary to anecdotes. His text is skilfully interlarded with stories about ...”

“... that, had he wished, he could have been the winner). Afterwards, when I told my fellow students (self-professed intellectuals to a man) how I had spent that day, I was struck by their lack of interest in the author of Regain and Que ma joie demeure as compared to their curiosity about Fachleitner, le berger de Manosque. Some years later, when I was living by ...”

“... work through its consequences until they either give a consistent and believable answer or become self-contradictory. A sample of this type is the numerical solution of the multiplication sum, BALL × BAT = TEAPOT. It is easy to see that L must equal 1, and that B can be only 2 or 3. To get any further one has to plump for one or other figure for B and go ...”

“... is more vivid than Flaubert’s own deliberations on the subject: he once described his adolescent self as ‘a mushroom swollen with boredom’. But then Sartre seems unwilling – too jealous, even – to give Flaubert his head in quotation. Within the fictional flow there are occasional passages of trenchant analysis. The Sartre of Les Mots returns with ...”

“... of exile and the value of art. But Walcott doesn’t take comfort. In the title poem he explores self-accusingly the relationship between travel and betrayal. The speaker is a man who has attained a position of power in a Third World country, and who is used to being told: ‘You are so fortunate, you get to see the world.’ But seeing the world, we ...”