“... authorised the action, had it been asked. Even in the absence of a UN resolution, the right of self-defence allows a country to make a necessary and proportionate response. The US suffered a devastating attack, Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility, the Taliban endorsed his acts and refused to surrender him. Only two countries opposed the ...”

“... but in a painful, deeply embarrassing way. One of the white girls approaches Arnetta, ‘full of self-importance’, saying: ‘See, I’m a Brownie.’ The emotional impact is intense enough for the reader to accept what might seem a rather obvious lesson: white girls can be Brownies too. On the bus home, some of the Brownies try to hang onto their status ...”

“... What Plath is really doing, she explains, is writing a poem in which phrases that look like self-descriptions (‘I/smile, cross-legged,/Enigmatical’) generate patterns of sound and form that ‘feed into’ new images. Plath notices she is constructing her poem in this way and inserts phrases like ‘shifting my clarities’ that let the reader know ...”

“... of Castiglione, who obsessively posed for the photographer Pierson in a startling range of self-chosen costumes and attitudes. In an image reminiscent of Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, Fini poses melodramatically in the shadowy recesses of a bed with her black-stockinged legs prominently on display; in another, she emerges confrontationally from a ...”

“... sources follow their own varied agendas, from Seneca, who links Maecenas’ lack of stylistic self-control in his writings with his reputation for loose morals, to Martial and Juvenal, for whom he represents a lost, more privileged age.Philologists have diligently collected the fragments of Maecenas’ own work, but these are just as hard to be sure ...”

“... a governing metaphor for omniscient narration. Plot becomes a tussle between individuals’ self-command and the planetary formations that determine essential facts about their nature: what look like deeply improbable, chance happenings – a bullet wound springing up out of nowhere on a ghostly figure’s chest; an illiterate woman suddenly being able ...”

“... A telling reproach, whatever one’s view of souls. A fine teacher! He knew the proper medicine. Self-righteousness would never be the same, It ceased to be a right. He could never keep his pipe alight, Smouldering matches rained about him. Once he gave it up, to discipline the spirit. His aunties told us over tea and cake:     ‘Because he burnt a hole ...”

“... Liverpudlian’ plays self-mockingly on the idea of ‘pool’. I was born in Liverpool. I would be flattering myself if I claimed that you need to be a comedian to survive there. But Liverpudlians do, like punsters, switch things about: they breathe through their mouths and talk through their noses. They are physiological, existential twisters ...”

“... soil, dig, drill, and lay it down; That’s why the villain loves the villanelle. The enamoured self is soft and needs a shell Though mentors and tormentors seem to frown; Because it’s hard, you want to do it well. Sportsmen and travellers are inclined to tell The scores and challenges that didn’t get them down; Not why the villain loves the ...”

“... of demonstrative argument. This mathematical model requires an argument to begin from certain self-evident principles and assumptions and to proceed by deductive arguments which transmit the certainty of the premises to the conclusions; Socratic cross-examination evidently cannot meet these standards. If Vlastos is right, Plato’s mathematical model for ...”

“... not need to know this but I need to tell you – is merely the converse of the darkly enigmatic self-tormentor, with his one virtue and a thousand crimes. Good writers soon grasped that the best way to deal with this hero is to place him in the most equivocal dimension possible, by means of different narrators, or variously subtle forms of ...”

“... violently emotive to Saint-Just himself, and that he carried this meaning, with all his stunning self-assurance and self-righteousness, intact into the storm centre of Revolutionary politics. In ‘De la Nature’ Saint-Just took the theoretical framework of European natural law and contorted it to express his own hectic ...”

“... the portraits left by Nadar, is in many ways a capital document for understanding the tormented, self-destructive trajectory of his ‘life’. Gaëtan Picon remarked that in the Nadar photograph of 1862 the 41-year-old Baudelaire looked as if he were a hundred (Baudelaire himself, in one of the ‘Spleen’ poems, made it a thousand). The face, above all ...”

“... directed to elevating the minds of the humbler classes. Birmingham, on the other hand, was more self-interested but also more aesthetically aware, and a number of local collectors were amateur artists themselves. Macleod relates these differences to the industrial character of the two cities: the textile manufacturing of Lancashire was big ...”

“... to ‘I’, and edging just a little further over into fictionality with the invention of self-made hero Tom Owens, the multi-millionaire founder of a West Coast biotech company he christens ‘Genesis’: ‘He thought of himself as a guy in jeans, barefoot in the boardroom.’ But the story’s focus, the person whose point of view we share, even if ...”