“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pushed up above his forehead. He is like a wonderfully exotic rhinoceros, but with a grace and self-assurance that wouldn’t be out of place on the catwalk.24 August. Our GNER train from Leeds stops at Retford, where passengers are bussed down the A1 to Grantham, the line between being under repair. It’s around seven and the clouds are beginning to ...”

“... allowed ex-soldiers to call openly and repeatedly for the reconstitution of the army. You allowed self-appointed leaders of ‘civil society’ to do everything in their power to disrupt your government. You allowed radio stations to sustain a relentless campaign of disinformation. You allowed demonstrations to go on day after day, calling for you to be ...”

“... couldn’t win on the battlefield. On wealth-sharing and compensation, Majzoub’s position seemed self-defeating: having conceded $700 million in fiscal payments for Darfur’s state governments, he refused to raise the down payment into the fund for war victims above $30 million. On such relatively minor points, the acceptability of the deal, and Darfur’s ...”

“... as he tends to call them. At the same time, his novels refuse to fasten down positions – self and other, Arab and Jew, victim and transgressor – or assign virtues and vices according to which side a character is on. If enmity were that straightforward then nothing would need to be asked about it. Khoury has always asked questions about stories. In ...”

“... on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her she had a beautiful voice. Glenn Gould was a self-proclaimed ‘Streisand freak’. Streisand shrugged off the accolades: ‘I just thought it was bashert, as they say in Yiddish, which means “meant to be”. It felt as if I were simply fulfilling the vision that I had as a child.’In 1962, Barbra the ...”

“... Bukele wore a black tunic with pharaonic gold embroidery and a sash in the national colours, a self-conscious caricature of el presidente. ‘Bukele now is like a messianic figure,’ Picardo said. ‘Every event must have a red carpet. Ministers must stand when he enters a room. In their speeches, they always say “as President Bukele said”, or ...”

“... experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... goes out of his way to heap blame on the other, whether motivated more by vengeance (Marchica) or self-preservation (Pizzuco). As it happens, Bellodi is on the right track, but there’s never any guarantee – quite the opposite, in fact – that a confession obtained by force or trickery is going to be true.The image of a chain of suspects returns in ...”

“... Levertov found something chilling about her command on the page, an ugliness in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems … She wrote some great things – saw ...”

“... under floorboards or digging them into the earth, of concealing the colour of your hair (self-Aryanisation by peroxide), of burying your feelings lest they betray you.Donald’s best friend, Roy Redgrave, discovered that his father kept a loaded .45 service revolver hidden under his bedside table. Roy knew his father as ‘a happy-go-lucky man’, so ...”

“... of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse. Nationalists speak of a historical racism that has merely migrated from government to civil society with the end of colonial rule, while civil society activists speak of an ...”