“... be wanting a tax refund.’ Just as fracking for shale gas should be encouraged to make Britain self-sufficient in energy, he said, British farmers needed to be supported to grow grain, because the country’s grain-importing ports were vulnerable to terrorist attack. It was clear he didn’t take the prospect of an end of farm subsidies very seriously. He ...”

“... six answers to his first defence put together, and must be the most voluminous mixture of Shandean self-exhibition and vulgar abuse ever to have been allowed into a journal professedly committed to rational discourse. The English text of these pieces incidentally suggests in places that Derrida and his translator do not have between them a sufficient knowledge ...”

“... time to time, like an old door. ‘No, no, no, young man! Laughton was certainly not addicted to self-abuse!’ And out of the dark it came to me that dreamy perfume of jasmine issued from no flowering shrub but, instead, right out of the opening sequence of Double Indemnity, do you remember? And I suffered a ghastly sense of incipient humiliation, of ...”

“... part in importing far more than it can export. The Bundesbank of a newly unified, far more self-confident Germany naturally did nothing and it may even have dumped some of its own stock of depreciating sterling. The British response was a cascade of press and Parliamentary insults of which ‘Nazi bastards’ is only the most printable – an episode ...”

“... and of women as family-bound. But with all that can be said on the ABC’s stubbornly Reithian self-concepts, they’re not the whole story, for the Thirties or since. For country listeners especially, the national stations opened worlds which were otherwise closed: and it was in 1938 that its independent news service began to break the strict limits set ...”

“... in which misleading Parliament would be (to use a Scottism) ‘not inappropriate’. There were self-satisfied references to the need to be ‘economical with the truth’ in wartime or during a devaluation crisis, as though these extreme situations justified a general policy of deceit. Dogged lawyer that he was, Scott merely referred his witnesses back to ...”

“... control. They wanted the state to cease censoring their output and the industry to become self-financing. Their demands drew the perfect response – the first was granted, as the censorship retreated then withdrew; the second was ignored, as subsidies continued and, until 1990, were even increased. This liberating state of affairs seemed to inhibit ...”

“... or with her resemblance to a doll. Leslie Fiedler, in Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978), identified what he called ‘scale freaks’ as the most enduring; Crachami’s main strength as an exhibit was certainly her ability to befuddle her viewers’ sense of scale. (A decade or so later, Dickens wrote about a dwarf exhibited at Greenwich ...”

“... liabilities of which their bosses were aware. She’d been unsure whether the garb was a matter of self-regard or cowardice or a recherché form of etiquette, since more often than not it seemed to go beyond the call of common sense. She was aghast when reporters trussed up in protective clothing were mixing with endangered civilians. ‘I could never have ...”

“... again help elected governments depleted by twenty years of small-state claptrap to regain their self-confidence and find their way back to their own citizens. What about Britain? Everyone in the EU – well, almost everybody – is mournful about British semi-detachment. But it seems to me now that the Union and the Eurozone would both be better off without ...”

“... design team glanced back and saw ‘the minister crouched over his desk, his face wreathed in a self-satisfied smirk.’ That same evening Hughes called a hasty conference to announce Utzon’s ‘resignation’, adding that he saw no problem in finishing the Opera House without him. There was one obvious problem. Utzon had won the contest and he was ...”

“... case the Social-National Assembly of Ukraine, i.e. the far right, and in Aidar’s case the self-defence units of Maidan); others had been raised by locals who were willing to fight. In early August, the Maidan encampment was still partly intact, but the energy had vanished. One evening, at the edge of what remained of it, I happened across a group of ...”

“... upper-case logos of merchant banks, the conspicuous marathon charities, on the tight T-shirts of self-punishing joggers. I interviewed the painter Jock McFadyen, who has been, for many years, a haunter of the towpath, exercising his greyhound, or cycling to his studio beside London Fields. ‘Every time I hear that ting,’ he said, ‘I feel like kicking ...”

“... vivacious in her pretty mauve dress, welcomes visitors with a radiant smile. David is a calm, self-possessed boy; after handing his used needles to Gisela, the social worker from Compañeros, in exchange for new ones, he readily shows us the abscesses on his neck and groin before introducing his friends and politely asking some questions about life in ...”

“... to clean, to cook and to tend. At its worst, it’s a fundraising and travel opportunity for the self-serving. We went to lunch down the road from Grand Bayou, at Ann’s Restaurant and Catering, a collection of trailers by the side of the road in Port Sulphur, with the Reverend Tyronne Edwards of the Zion Travelers Co-operative Center, a dark-skinned man in ...”