“... 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 ...”

“... such as central bankers who were perceived to have an excess of control – technical control, self-control, careful attention to consequences – and handed over to those who, frankly, seem a little out of control. Contrast a figure like Bernanke, poring over speeches to decide whether it’s time to use the metaphor of a market ‘bubble’ or persist ...”

“... he took orders in 1615. Debates persist about Donne’s religion. What balance of conviction and self-interest led him to convert, and later to take orders? What kind of Protestant did he become: Calvinist? Arminian? First one then the other, changing with the times? Was Dr Donne, dean of St Paul’s, an unequivocal supporter of royal ecclesiastical ...”

“... prince, Mohammad bin Salman, who trained as a competition lawyer, has announced a plan to build a self-sustaining high-tech city, full of robots and covering an area 15 times the size of London, on the Red Sea coast. ‘All Gulf rulers are erasing history in the name of creating mega-cities,’ Ahmed Mater, a Saudi photographer, told me when we met in his ...”

“... baker and café, this was true, but in his phrasing there was, as there could be, an element of self-parody. A profile of him when he was president of the Cambridge Union in 1953, which he must have had a hand in writing himself, said: ‘It is far from the flash of photographers’ bulbs that you will find the real Hugh.’ Next to that remark is a large ...”

“... our sense of it is mostly derived from his own writings. He had an almost obsessive interest in self-portrayal. The Canzoniere is a kind of emotional autobiography; the Posteritati (‘Letter to Posterity’), which gives an account of his life up to 1351, is no less carefully tailored. As a young man he studied law in Montpellier and Bologna, but swiftly ...”

“... be made. Where loving is concerned, we seem to be reaching a situation in which, as so often with self-estimation, the entire population considers itself ‘above average’. If this all seems fanciful, then consider the following example. In 2001 the US government introduced measures designed to improve educational outcomes in underperforming schools ...”

“... networks such as Fox News with rival tribal television networks. American TV news today creates a self-referential world of half-truths and alleged plots that is consumed by its viewers for hours every day. Many Fox viewers don’t watch anything else and describe the channel as an important part of their lives. Many in the UK will resist the idea of partial ...”

“... fascists and Bolshevists, the feel of satin; who was dolphin-like in his movements, an obsessive self-googler before easy engines existed, who could not spell ‘tongue’ correctly on the first try. Every writer should have such a pedant – every writer should have two, returning in the evenings to commune over the crucial works, the neglected ...”

“... sleaze and corruption appeared in the Telegraph. The piece lambasted ‘the deep complacency and self-serving nature of the British establishment’ and railed against the way ‘donors end up with peerages in the House of Lords’. The conclusion was damning. ‘Our problem is not really about individual politicians, nor even political parties. The problem ...”

“... and claiming that she wrote it when she was drunk. Freud speculated that writers turn the crude, self-aggrandising materials of daydreams into literature. Rereading L’Amant, I can’t help thinking that it contains a good deal of ego-boosting romantic fantasy. A ravishing, sexually magnetic impoverished young woman lords it over a rich lover, half-mad with ...”

“... or moral superiority, just genuine lack of interest. I wish it would all go away. Sickened by the self-righteousness of the newspapers, which, though it takes a different form, is as nauseating in the Independent as it is in the Sun. Depressed too by the continuing corruption of public life, ex-members of the Government moving straight onto the boards of the ...”

“... criticism of Jews.In Novick’s words, the Holocaust has ‘mandated an intransigent and self-righteous posture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ and ‘allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate grounds for criticising Israel’. According to Nathan Glazer in the second edition of American Judaism, the Holocaust gave Jews ‘the ...”

“... gave him his cards ‘for good and sufficient cause’, Keaton was stripped of everything but his self-loathing. What followed were a few unmoored years of benders and breakdowns.In 1940, Keaton Productions Inc. was dissolved; his life as a filmmaker was over. In the same year, the 21-year-old dancer Eleanor Norris became Keaton’s third wife. (His second ...”