“... for Britain’, which was seen as a transparent leadership pitch. She responded with a self-denying ordinance pledging she would never again as home secretary stray beyond her brief. She stuck to it during the EU referendum, limiting herself to a few half-hearted remarks about the security implications, where the case for Remain was always going to ...”

“... family members had little or no access.Correspondence was subject to military censorship, but self-censorship was even more effective in concealing the realities of war. The appelés were keen to reassure their parents of their safety, or to flirt with their girlfriends. Writing letters was a means of escape. Michel Berthelémy wrote to his family every ...”

“... that planners should know which kind they’re getting into. The first, ‘in it to win it’, is self-explanatory: the proxy is used to defeat an enemy’s forces. The second, ‘holding action’, involves the idea that the aim of an intervention by proxy may be to prolong a civil war in order to to maintain the status quo. The third type, perhaps the most ...”

“... anything Colette had ever done with Willy at her shoulder; she had an ‘uncompromising zeal for self-exploitation’, as Angela Carter once said). Could it be that Colette was actually censored from Aberdeen District Libraries in the 1970s? We should have been doing her for French O Grade. We could have learned so much it would have been so good to ...”

“... form of curatorial management, organising chunks of text on a screen. The discerning scholarly self on which the humanities depend was conceived as the product of transitions between spaces – library, lecture hall, seminar room, study – linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interface with screen and keyboard, and ...”

“... Brezhnev, characteristically, did not blame his colleagues or saboteurs, but – after ritual self-criticism – urged his staff into such desperate efforts that the first blast furnace was fired up on time that June. He was forgiven: Stalin awarded him the Order of Lenin at the end of the year. ‘What attracted so many people to Brezhnev,’ wrote Roy ...”

“... by those who derived their power, wealth and privileges from the ancien régime. But normally, the self-interested enemies of the revolution acquire the support of that vast majority of the population which is disgusted by the revolutionaries’ indiscriminate violence. That, of course, is why most revolutions fail. What has been happening in Italy is ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... the text and the text is decomposed into the several acts of power discerned by an omniscient if self-destructive reader. However deep the tensions and contradictions which O’Brien finds in the ‘melody’, he finds them also in Burke; and it is a consequence that they existed because of the complexities of ‘it’, and of Burke’s attitudes toward ...”

“... rebellion be, as the images of disorder in Arcadia testify. The two writers know how prone to self-deception is the human heart. In the new Arcadia Amphialus draws up a manifesto whose arguments for resistance might have been penned by one of Sidney’s Continental friends – only for Sidney to condemn the ‘foul treasons’ behind the document’s ...”

“... for legal constraints, there are always lawyers who can be hired to change them. This is a proud, self-made man who has known lots of humiliation in his time, and the power of money is the only way he understands of gaining, if not respect, then recognition – especially from the City and Tory Establishment: it was Edward Heath who stigmatised Lonrho as ...”

“... the sorrow written on his brow, pleased if we care to read between its lines? Every man has his self-image. He sees himself as One of the Old Stock. Some members say he is a snob. He is. Some say he is a prig. Not really. A prig is a man who sticks pedantically to his principles. Lennox has no principles, except survival. He is a popular member – greeted ...”

“... for a woman. ‘For patience, for reliability, for real judgment in carrying out directions, for self-control,’ Taylor was to write, ‘give me the little woman who has not been “educated” too much, and whose ambition is to be a good wife and mother ... Such women are capable of being the mothers of men.’ Jean Strouse picks up the fact that Alice’s ...”

“... by the activities of ambitious individuals thrusting their views upon him whilst a stagnant, self-protecting bureaucracy stands by and watches. Hamilton Jordan tells of his negotiations over the hostages with a secret and unnamed Iranian (he was surprised when he met him to find that he did not drink wine and wondered whether he was anxious not to seem ...”

“... as we shall see, would be to endorse the view that Scepticism is true and to invite the charge of self-refutation. Sextus thinks of his Outlines as a ‘narrative’, not as a demonstration, of Pyrrhonism. The Sceptic, he writes in a famous passage, is like the painter Apelles. Frustrated at his failure to depict the foaming mouth of a horse, Apelles flung ...”