“... hero, Duckworth Drew, whose name rhymed with his own and whose appearance matched his own self-image – ‘unobtrusive, of perfect manner, and a born gentleman’ – is first found outwitting the French Foreign Minister by offering him a cigar ‘drugged with a solution of cocculus indicus’. But after the entente, Le Queux was quick to switch ...”

“... it could be said that acts of ‘senseless kindness’ are usually no more than gestures of human self-satisfaction, the universal sentiment Tolstoy understood so well – and yet in some extraordinary way Grossman’s entire novel endorses the old madman’s point with all the secret force of which the language of art is capable. ‘Art’ is the operative ...”

“... over the last years. The charge of ‘crimes against peace’ was made to look its hypocritical self when someone, perhaps from a larger secret service, slipped a copy of the secret protocols of the August 1939 Soviet-German pact, with its details of the planned annexation of the Baltic states, into the hands of Hess’s defence lawyer while he walked the ...”

“... him to admire it, and Mr Coningham on his left entreating him to despise it, must end, in mere self-defence, in shaking both the critical gentlemen off, and judging for himself, not of the Bellini only, but of every other picture in the collection as well.’ There is a deliberate confusion between the assessment of the condition and authorship of a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rather theatrical-looking for farmers. James Irving stands very upright, wearing a trilby and a self-satisfied smile. Margaret Irving wears a choker and a bias-cut dress, very stylish, presumably of her own making. Voirrey, on the cusp of womanhood, has strong eyebrows and her hair is cut in a smooth bob. She is startlingly photogenic but looks ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... destruction.The connections between American violence abroad and American violence at home seemed self-evident to McVeigh, but for the majority of Americans even to hint at such connections remains taboo. Donald Trump has been the most significant beneficiary of the hypocrisy of American foreign policy as described by McVeigh. Before the last presidential ...”

“... hundred years.) Cromwell was so shattered by this debacle that he made one of his retreats into self-communion. Why had Providence abandoned him in this great endeavour? Typically, the answer he came up with was not that the expedition was a grandiose non-starter, and appallingly managed – all the objections Lambert had made in council. No, God had ...”

“... seems to have quietly slipped away. The plague, Camus’s narrator remarks, was losing ‘its self-command, the ruthless almost mathematical efficiency that had been its trump card hitherto’. Mathematics flattens. It is a killing art. Counting humans, alive or dead, means you have entered a world of abstraction, the first sign that things have taken a ...”