“... their own country, to save Britain from subservience to a great nation under the control of vain, self-deluding knaves and hypocrites and to save Britain from the moral corruption that comes from waging righteous wars of aggression against weak tyrants. Paul suggests we get some metal to put under the car seats to provide extra protection against landmines. I ...”

“... in another sixty or so killings, of protesters on both sides. The violence in Venezuela is now self-propelling. The opposition, still led largely by the economic and political elites, is divided between ‘moderates’, many of whom have adopted the social rights language of Chavismo, and right-wing ‘ultras’, who believe they are waging an end-times ...”

“... the Thor-type upward thrust of the entire being … the man or woman who is High Inside, hummingly self-aware … watching out for number one with a hundred new-born eyes.’ Krim was a downtown cat scrounging for glossy bylines who hadn’t made it and never would (one of his later essays was entitled ‘For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure ...”

“... and ‘Dear Heart’ there is further talk of income tax returns and outrage at reports of self-seeking behaviour by his brother’s fiancée, known as ‘The Disaster’. I make an appearance in the letter too: not then two years old, I feature as a gooseberry in the garden, a conspicuous impediment, as he imagines it, to my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph in January, ‘have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands.’ On the one hand, then, the modest mayor of London. On the other, a former head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (as paraphrased by Brian Stone): ‘Only ...”

“... He seems to have no moral compass, and if he has a compass at all it’s fixed permanently on self-seeking.23 February. I go to the chemist in search of Collis Browne, which Boots choose no longer to sell, though why no one can explain. Depending on what one wants, the chemist has always been a theatre of embarrassment, though never so much as when our ...”

“... and fairest way to respond.’ Sometimes, his sense of regret spills over into absurd levels of self-chastisement. The first email prime minister never got the hang of Twitter, and now he feels that he was negligent in not doing so. He notes that Margaret Thatcher did all right without it – indeed, ‘the very idea that she could have contained her ...”

“... onto which analysts project their diagnosis of a crisis that is as much American as Sino-American. Self-critical American liberals see the Trump presidency as the result of the derailment of US globalisation policy, above all in relation to China: blue-collar resentment, stoked by unbalanced trade, put Trump in office. Meanwhile, Trump and his team put the ...”

“... she said: ‘Probably.’ Internal resistance to the liberalisation of Syria is strong, born of self-interest and fear of sudden change in a country where military coups were annual events until Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970. When some Americans speak blithely of asking Lebanon to sign a peace treaty with Israel or to permit an American naval base in ...”

“... slopes. Buñuel points the camera at a goat about to risk the next precarious step, as though self-consciously for the camera, before it loses its footing and falls. He also finds a donkey being stung to death by bees. (Sour honey was the main export from the region.) The voiceover, accompanied by a piece of Brahms, announces that a group of shepherds in ...”

“... of this letter and sets the tone for its future interpretation:There is a great deal of self-conscious ‘Bohemian’ boasting about swopping copies of Daudet’s risqué decadent novel Sapho (the story of a young man from the country hopelessly infatuated with a beguiling, corrupt, artist’s mistress) and about how ‘blue’ she is for ...”