“... 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 ...”

“... or a civil war as overtook Greece. De Gaulle had redeemed French honour and given a sense of self-respect back to the French people. Second, he extricated France from Algeria without a civil war on the mainland. Third, in the constitution of the Fifth Republic, he bequeathed political arrangements that had proved durable.In 2018, none of these ...”

“... the magazine, nor did he acknowledge that with this leak Moreau’s group was acting with as much self-interest, and as little regard for the consequences, as Moreau had accused the CIA of doing. The officer explained that it was understood by all that the scandal would unravel in public very quickly, and Congress would get involved. ‘Our goals were to ...”

“... invigilators, we encounter a brutal parody of high politics in the outside world: shame, betrayal, self-deception and the art of deceiving others, though the guards in Tazmamart were the inmates’ only public. BineBine pitied them. They were ‘the dregs of colonisation, poor wretches, who had lost their souls after selling their consciences to a system they ...”

“... Contrary to a well-known English dictum, stoical if self-exonerating, all political lives do not end in failure. In postwar Europe, it is enough to think of Adenauer or De Gasperi, or perhaps even more impressively, Franco. But it is true that, in democratic conditions, to be more popular at the close than at the outset of a prolonged period in office is rare ...”

“... for perjury applicable to evidence given to the Inquiry? Does the normal protection against self-incrimination apply? I have not found firm rulings on these matters, and the imprecision is, I think, deliberate. Nothing like the Bloody Sunday Inquiry has ever taken place in Britain or a Commonwealth country before, and there are no precedents. No Royal ...”

“... social services and the police. The risks she took were not reasonable in the circumstances but self-interested. If she had really cared about her baby, they argued, she would have handed her in.But Marten felt she had no choice. She wanted to have a family with Gordon: meeting him was ‘fate’, she said. She knew that any child she had with him would be ...”

“... another group, Stop HS2, has had to launch an appeal to pay its co-ordinator, Joe Rukin, who is self-employed; in December he was paid just £380, which Rukin said had forced him to ‘reconsider his position’. Despite this group’s lack of funds, supporters of HS2 have tended to dismiss the ‘antis’ as well-heeled Buckinghamshire residents, more ...”

“... that I sometimes thought I might have a heart attack from the anger that shot up from its coiled self in Shoot-Up Hill, as it sprang powerful and metallic but always kept inside. Not really dangerous, honestly, an anger that afflicted only me. Another door. This time the right sort. Me on the outside, Doris inside. I knock, although she knows I’m there ...”