“... supportive, Yiddish and English-speaking parents, growing up in a tough but precariously self-respecting community which would later become a black ghetto, Podhoretz was the star pupil in the local high school, where white students felt threatened by gangs of teenaged blacks. In his 1963 essay ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’, this early ...”

“... cows originally brought to America by the Spanish colonisers and allowed to run wild. Remarkably self-sufficient, the longhorn cow was not wholly unlike the buffalo it replaced.The Amerindians for their part were replaced by Anglo-Americans and Hispanics, who moved around on horseback, herding the cows together and driving them east to be killed. As ...”

“... of capitalism is obliged to take the very form of the market – novelty, stereotype, flash self-advertisement, cheap repeatable motif – deep into its bones. ‘Baudelaire wanted to create a poncif, a cliché. Lemaître assures him that he has succeeded.’ Finally, then, after what seems like long wandering away from the world of the arcades, we ...”

“... confidence? Who is the man that can sacrifice every principle of public virtue to the most sordid self-interest? Who is the man that, without remorse, can disturb the tranquillity of domestic happiness? Who is the man that, without mercy or common decency, can wound the peace of every honest individual? Who is the man that is false to his friends, inimical to ...”

“... which puts an almost treacly patina on the prose – designer prose it is, good, tasteful and self-evidently rich. In this book he writes about the rich too, Ravelstein suddenly a multi-millionaire from the success of his book (Bloom’s original book called The Closing of the American Mind). I’m perhaps behind the times here but I would have thought it ...”

“... you thought he was about to make his point, he took an abrupt turn and plunged into a deep pool of self-pity. This involved a long-winded anecdote about how the Supreme Court judges would rather attend a colleague’s daughter’s wedding than just get it over with and decide that he is a constitutional president … I have heard some dictators’ speeches in ...”

“... camera. Celebrities like Jim Carrey and Courtney Cox played themselves as ‘guests’, often self-mockingly. The critics loved it. It inspired Ricky Gervais and the later work of Larry David. It was loathsomely funny about the showbiz world it roasted and was part of. Yet, as it turns out, it wasn’t hard enough on itself. Biskind quotes Janis Hirsch, a ...”

“... in a pharmaceutical state he called ‘Obetrolling’. My affinity for Obetrol had to do with self-awareness, which I used to privately call ‘doubling’. It’s hard to explain. I’m still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room, seated in a ...”

“... had received serious head injuries, and about twenty had lost an eye. Then there’s the matter of self-inflicted harm: the pig-headedness of railing against a lower speed limit, which figures suggest is already responsible for a drop in road deaths; the destruction of speed cameras; the demonisation of Macron; the flurries of fake news and wild theories from ...”

“... to which Peckham had fallen.Critics presented the rejection of the Berkeley plan as an act of self-harm by a borough that is desperately short of homes. Members of Britain Remade, a national campaign group led by, among others, a former adviser to Boris Johnson and the former head of policy at the Adam Smith Institute, cited the case as proof that ‘it ...”

“... by then solicitors. The three men declined to say anything, taking advantage of the rule against self-incrimination so often attacked by the police themselves. Another four months passed before, on 22 November 1990, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the three detectives were to be charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Under ...”

“... writing we often sense that an emphatic commitment is being played off against a meditative self-consciousness. Hazlitt is a good hater, but one of the things he most hates is the man who refuses to countenance ‘the bye-play of various points of view’. Offered the choice between being full of conviction or being open-minded, he chooses both by ...”

“... Sallust, Livy and Plutarch; to Appian and Cassius Dio on the civil war; to Tacitus and the self-serving Josephus, sensibly changing sides in the course of the Jewish revolt in Palestine in 67-69 and surviving to write its history; and to Ammianus Marcellinus, an amiable pagan from Antioch, who was writing at the end of what Gibbon called the ‘long ...”

“... when Kgalema Motlanthe too was released he gave him a union sinecure. He even provided Gwala, a self-described Stalinist and one of the most frightening men I’ve ever met, with a car and money. (Gwala, who would quite happily kill not only opponents but anyone on his own side who got in the way, had a paralysed arm but would gesture fiercely with his one ...”

“... Khlebnikov, had died in 1922, but Kharms joined the group that had formed around Khlebnikov’s self-professed heir, the now largely forgotten poet Aleksandr Tufanov. Through these connections, Kharms met a number of other poets and writers, with whom he founded an experimental theatre group in 1927; this in turn was the basis for a new literary movement ...”