“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ways. De Gaulle was brisk and had a military manner, used to being obeyed; Mitterrand was self-confident and haughty. In the early 1990s, I interviewed a former resistance member who had known Mitterrand during the war and found him ‘terribly cold and distant’ – ‘never a true socialist’. When the two men met again in Lille in the early ...”

“... diminish in professionals who work daily with people in pain; it would, not least, be a matter of self-protection. Once​ Mr Lagnari knew he had cancer, the rate at which his pain worsened accelerated. Of course his tumour was growing, as were the metastases in his liver, but it was also his perception that he’d been invaded that quickened his pain. At ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”