“... they feared a salaried state medical service that would deny them the financial opportunities of self-employment. State intervention, Clegg argued, was ‘something essentially harmful to medicine’, the only way to counter the widespread support for the NHS was to launch a virulent witchhunt against Bevan. A plebiscite of doctors was planned for 31 January ...”

“... feel itself doomed to be at permanent odds with almost half the population, and would not go into self-destructive paroxysms every time it failed to get its own way. The result might be a stable, enduring settlement commanding majority support among both communities. Is this likely? Almost certainly not. Trimble has been praised for signing the Good Friday ...”

“... of intelligence. Some social success was obviously necessary, but so was a deep reserve and a deep self-esteem. He found Joyce to be ‘a quiet but rather dogmatic man’ who had ‘(as I am convinced most superior persons have) a sense of his own importance’. And Eliot was certainly a superior person. It happens that the letters have little to say about ...”

“... Canary Wharf: He looks as if he might have been. He exudes that combination of aloofness and self-satisfaction which invites bullying. I can imagine wanting to smash his glasses in the playground. I can even imagine wanting to do it now. But what I think I would really like to do now would be to get somebody to hold his arms behind his back while I grasp ...”

“... case. But if he can, then Clinton should have refused to waive his ordinary right against self-incrimination. If, for over-riding political reasons, Clinton had to accept being deposed before the grand jury, Dershowitz adds, he should have appeared in person rather than allowing himself to be videotaped, knowing that the video would probably be releas ...”

“... had read about in London in the 1910s. But those were later developments; and they were elaborate self-deceptions with which Pound rationalised his continuing support for a regime whose moral bankruptcy was increasingly apparent. They were not what had sparked his initial interest, as he acknowledged in an unpublished essay of 1933: ‘I bet on Italian ...”

“... Sometimes the cult worked better than one would expect. Like many survivalists it wanted to be self-contained. It made its own guns and, I think, its own bullet-proof vests. We have a report here of a young man who was told to learn how to work as a magazine printer and book-binder. So he worked for a few months in a print shop, and learned his trade. Then ...”

“... Had I put on the recording myself the spell would have been nowhere near as powerful because self-induced. Why this should be I can’t think, though doubtless Proust would know.7 September. Alan Clark dies. I never met him, though I saw him once in the street, noting then that he shared a walk with Denis Healey, both of them swinging their arms ...”

“... highway improvements, completed by American firms earlier this year, provide a pretext for self-congratulation. Embassy handouts do not mention the regular attacks by bandits and insurgents that force most officials to travel by plane between the cities. Conditions, according to embassy spokesmen, are always ‘improving’. Victory in last month’s ...”

“... Disney didn’t understand the emotional and pragmatic realities beyond his own wounded sense of self: ‘In this one episode, his instincts faltered: when artists expected to see the fellow artist, he showed them his business side, and when businessmen expected to work with the businessman, he gave them the emotional artist.’ Once Disney lost his ...”

“... been a dominant feature of both the Sharif and Bhutto governments? Benazir Bhutto was already in self-exile in Dubai; the Sharif brothers had been arrested. Before they could be charged, however, Washington organised an offer of asylum from Saudi Arabia, a state whose ruling family has institutionalised the theft of public funds. Musharraf’s unstinting ...”

“... was, by any standard, a nut, an ultra-nationalist, a man of extremes and a bit of a whiner. His self-presentation as the emasculated primal peasant Frenchman is not attractive. He was a man of modest talent, if fierce beliefs, who represents the virulence of art as it engages with the politics of its time. His career, as McWilliam argues, is exemplary of a ...”

“... imagined cluster of contaminants and invaders, not all of them embodying the British state. As a self-declared member of this tendency, Goldring starts counting the encroachments as soon as his bus enters Essex. To begin with, it’s a matter of industrial sprawl, ‘bungaloid growth’, and the signposts recently placed to identify footpaths for the benefit ...”

“... case for preserving anything of the Press Complaints Commission, the industry’s voluntary self-regulator, except its Code of Practice, which – as often happens – sets out admirable principles which the more aggressive of its subscribers seem to have very little difficulty in circumventing. What a regulator will, I would urge, be required to ...”

“... the northern provinces signed the Union of Utrecht, becoming the United Provinces, Protestant, self-governing and independent from Spain. They were thereafter definitively separated from the southern Catholic Netherlands, still governed by Spain, first in the person of John of Austria. By the end of the century, the ever more numerous Dutch soldiers came ...”