“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the rest of the community? It is just not possible.’ Heath believed in a Europe that was self-contained, tightly integrated and able to assert itself against American triumphalism in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In that sense, he remained Britain’s one true Gaullist and his case against expansion echoed the one that de Gaulle ...”

“... the Delius Cello Concerto it premiered). She thinks playing on bad cellos has made her a more self-sufficient musician. As Kennedy says, and as every player knows, the relation of every cello to its player is reciprocal. When I play my teacher’s high-school cello it sounds like a trombone in a shower; I am convinced that his subtle and sophisticated bow ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”