“... difference. Although the first person singular runs through his prose and verse, it never has the self-regard of Jonson or Milton, those elevated monitors of the nation. He is candid about the motive of personal ‘ambition’ which may coexist with an author’s more uplifting aims. He nonetheless knows a writer’s duty to be ‘delightful and profitable to ...”

“... form that asks about everything from your food bill to your investments has made it impossible for self-employed people like builders and plumbers to get legal aid; it has meant that a girl who was thought too dangerous to be given a pen was held for two weeks because she couldn’t sign the form; and it has made things more difficult for people who haven’t ...”

“... he had insisted on for the dancers in Jeux and L’Après-midi d’un faune, that voidance of self that allowed him so eerily to inhabit the characters of slaves, a puppet, a flower and a faun, allowed him to find a brief affinity with modernism, just as a clock stuck at 8.30 will twice a day find an affinity with actual time, until finally blankness took ...”

“... cultures and enables the monetisation of political markets. It takes a state with considerable self-confidence and financial autonomy to resist the pressures to play this game. Those that hold out against the intrusions are often unsavoury – North Korea and Burma, for instance – but there are two sides to international intervention and peacekeeping ...”

“... his sins (that is, his desire); or Run Lola Run (1998), in which Man communicates despair and self-hatred from the Berlin equivalent, while Woman does something about it, in postmodern fashion, three times over. As these examples demonstrate, phone boxes have led an exciting imaginary life, and not always in big cities. A good deal of folklore attaches to ...”

“... internal decay or conquest from without, but also stunts republican virtue and denies it healthy self-propagation. In his Novanglus letters of 1774 to the Massachusetts Bay colonists, John Adams repeats the ‘saying of Machiavel no wise man ever contradicted, which has been literally verified in this province, that “while the mass of the people is not ...”

“... grounds and buildings of the Sree Narayana Mangalam Institute of Management and Technology, a ‘self-financing engineering college affiliated to the Mahatma Gandhi university’. The landscape runs off towards the coast where there are paddy fields and prawn farms. Malankara is inland now because this stretch of central Keralan coastland is constantly ...”

“... points out, ‘all the faces suggest the same even and unruffled temper, a complete command of self coupled with a sociable ease in the presence of others’; and while certain gestures may suggest the sitters are about to speak, as a rule they appear ‘more inclined to listen’. The sitters almost never seem to speak, either, in the other genre of ...”

“... the head of Deutsche Bank, has caused a stir by admitting ‘I no longer believe in the market’s self-healing power.’ The state has had to stand between the market and the abyss. Had the British government not rescued Northern Rock, bank runs would have brought down other institutions and destroyed confidence in the UK’s financial system. Had the Federal ...”

“... didn’t, and died a month later.) But when Larkin’s letters are published he says: ‘All that self-loathing, at full spurt, bubble, ooze & drip. His tribe laps it up.’ The letters are ‘stinking bile-green weeds’.Like Larkin, Hughes was a devout monarchist, and this shows in a letter to the Queen Mother thanking her for having him and his ...”

“... the government through hot and cold wars – and cast themselves in the trusty frontier mould of self-made men and women. Like Westerners throughout American history, they deeply resented the East Coast establishment. Why did social prestige accrue to effete, Ivy League, ‘egg-headed, homosexual, left-leaning financiers’, as the Wisconsin senator Joseph ...”

“... into an index of his strength. His mind is free of the lumber of precepts; intellectually he is a self-made man. Though precociously brilliant in the visual arts (according to Vasari’s Life, and arguable from other evidence), Leonardo was a late starter as a writer. Some isolated folios survive from the 1470s, when he was in his twenties, but the earliest ...”

“... his family draws near haunts the whole book, between the lines as well as in intense episodes of self-questioning. Who was this person who was ‘going on the pilgrimage’, ‘en anthropologue’, as he initially imagined, for research? There are obvious schematic answers. A Moroccan trained academically in Morocco and France, he has lived in ...”

“... story that becomes harder to sustain with each retelling. If he still believes it, then he must be self-deceived; if he ceased at some point to believe it, or never believed it to start with, then he has been deceiving everyone else. Above all, though, what seems to unite Eden and Blair is the sheer recklessness of their military adventures, their willingness ...”

“... to provide services, a suddenly renewed authority to distribute land (now becoming scarce) and self-armed vigilantes all around, this was a charter for local-level ethnic cleansing. Immediately after this administrative reform, there was another round of killings in the far west of Darfur. Much of the present conflict, then, has its origins in land rights ...”