“... postwar Britain in anything like the same volume, as the country underwent a push towards national self-sufficiency in food.The vast dock complex built when Liverpool was at the heart of imperial power and British trade networks was abandoned. The new industrial estates created by the postwar social-developmental state were struggling. Obsolescence was layered ...”

“... office. But covering the Clinton presidency was more complex – or more thwarted. As exercises in self-defeat go, could anything match Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky? Denying it, as Clinton did, even more so. Yet John was reluctant to pursue the story. You could, if you were John, choose to avoid it for personal reasons, but journalistically – that was a ...”

“... was launched with a radical prospectus: 1. Recognition of the right of the Scottish people to self-determination 2. … assert that the Tories had no mandate to run Scotland 3. Non-payment of the poll tax 4. Labour participation in a Constitutional Convention 5. Non-co-operation at Westminster on Scottish business 6. Greater autonomy for ...”

“... Isherwood, who was in the habit of thinking well of people, thought Klaus ‘without vanity or self-consciousness’; ‘his great charm,’ Isherwood said, ‘lay in this openness, this eager, unaffected approach.’ Others didn’t share his view. Glenway Wescott called Klaus a ‘tragic twerp’; Janet Flanner thought he was pathetically dominated by ...”

“... her Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), a work of endurance art and political protest whose self-imposed ‘rules of engagement’ required her to carry a dormitory mattress everywhere she went on campus for nine months. ‘That image,’ Hillary Clinton said in her speech to the Democratic National Committee Women’s Leadership Forum in ...”

“... In the words of one Earth First! figurehead, their derring-do actions were undertaken in the ‘self-defence of the wild’, an intriguing syllogism. There was no plan by Earth Firsters in the US to ‘overthrow any social, political or economic system’.Earth First! in Britain came to the conclusion that the Americans were a bunch of rednecks, obsessed by ...”

“... HTP engine to use as a template. The Stentor was built with military money to power the Blue Steel self-propelled bomb. Blue Steel was designed to be released from a Vulcan over the wheatfields of Byelorussia and to fly the last 200 miles of its journey on its own. Over the target, a little hatch opened on the Blue Steel and the warhead dropped out – for no ...”

“... the process killing off a whole range of other initiatives that might have been more fruitful and self-sustaining. And now they were messengers from a lost world: the world in which British high-tech industry had existed since the Second World War, one sustained by the decisions of grandee industrialists and Whitehall mandarins with an ideal of the public ...”

“... regularly) were all much of a muchness, big, bold and, Mrs Ransome thought, with far too much self-confidence (she thought this was what they meant by ‘feisty’ and would have looked it up in Mr Ransome’s dictionary but wasn’t sure how it was spelled). They had names that defied gender: Robin, Bobby, Troy and some, like Tiffany, Page and ...”

“... realise how thoroughly a game once confined to windowless rooms and the tough-guy part of men’s self-imaginings has been democratised under the sign of cheap entertainment. Around the time Late Night Poker began, internet entrepreneurs also came to see what a dream opportunity poker presented. Simple software has made possible a proliferation of online ...”

“... hard to imagine how Merrill viewed all these adoring new arrivals, many of them posh, nervous and self-conscious. He seems to have known what to do with them and how to make himself useful to them. Forster later wrote in the afterword to Maurice, his posthumously published novel about what had happened to him at Millthorpe: George Merrill – touched my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Interahamwe fighters. In spite of its excesses and atrocities, Mayi-Mayi is seen locally as a self-defence operation carried out by ‘our children’ or ‘the people armed’ – and the same villagers who lament its violence often consider it a ‘necessary evil’. Often, too, they think of Mayi-Mayi as a resistance to ‘foreign ...”

“... 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 ...”