“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... another way. What is the relationship for a poet between writing a mind and writing a life? Does self-revelation (or confession, a label often used to describe the work of Plath and her contemporary Anne Sexton) lead us, not just into the inner recesses of the poet’s thought, but through the veils, behind the closed doors of her past? Do we enter the ...”

“... tasteless). Having always indulged the agricultural lobby, Chirac has done his utmost to delay the self-evidently necessary reform of the CAP. This is not to say that Europe doesn’t need an agricultural policy. There are good social, economic and ecological reasons for thinking that every major region in the world should have the means to feed its own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... school should be showcase projects, but what the auditors discovered makes nonsense of the CPA’s self-regarding mission to save and rebuild Iraq. There is a question of administrative oversight to be answered here. Buried in one of the appendices of an earlier SIGIR audit (of April 2005) is a report that the division level agent for South-Central Iraq was ...”

“... him; that she was a valuable member of the community and would be able to pass on the benefit of self-awareness to many, many others in the course of her life. Geoffrey was an excellent, kindly, caring husband, everyone agreed: a little older and slightly more wise than his fellow students; a rather stable Marxist, as opposed to a wild Trotskyite or ...”

“... keep at bay the night.’ And so he did. He continued to write until his death in 1957: Self-Condemned, his autobiographical novel of the Canadian years, and his most human book, was written during those dark years. A career like Lewis’s, so various and so full of anger, is difficult to assess, or even to describe. One might begin with a remark ...”

“... case study lurks here too: the uncertain tone of the Italian’s confessions, which veer between self-hatred, extravagant descriptions of himself as a monstrosity, and a frank acceptance of his nature and the pleasure he has found, is suggestive of the ways in which the ‘tragedy’ of being gay might be played up, not always consciously, as part of the bid ...”

“... touch them not.Like Keats when enraptured, Owen at his most fervent moves beyond inhibition and self-consciousness, here boldly evoking both Christ’s Noli me tangere and his crucifixion. Such analogies were commonplace in the iconography of pro-war propaganda, and on occasion, as in ‘Le Christianisme’, were ridiculed by Owen himself, but here they ...”

“... as idiosyncratic characters with disparate views and concerns, often larger than life, with a self-confidence and contempt for conformity and its agents that might seem surprising in the context of the society they came from. His claims for their long-term historical significance are modest (even as he devotes almost eight hundred pages to their ...”