“... 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 ...”

“... of hunters and filled many domestic pots. Hanna picks up strongly on the couple’s growing self-confidence, which was shown in the way they coped with the altered circumstances of their lives. Paul was obviously better placed to widen his horizons through his close contact with men from other backgrounds and other parts of France. He learned how to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rather two), ‘there is no meaning but something like a dream of meaning.’ Snatches of self-reflexive commentary are scattered throughout: The sentences not only undergo the normal deprivation of their intrinsic value and communication capacity but acquire acceleration and a centripetal and centrifugal force at the same time. It’s obvious that ...”

“... people and a few stray hippies, putting it all together with a poem by Allen Ginsberg in a self-published book. Rineke Dijkstra’s large-format full-length portraits of girls in Liverpool in 1995 announce a sudden shift in scale. Dressed for a night out at the Buzz Club they stand fidgety and self-conscious, not ...”

“... this, holding out against the dread prospect of statutory regulation. However, several bits of self-serving chaff get thrown into the picture here. One is the idea that journalists, as self-styled talkers of truth to power, should be above the law – the law against bribing the police, for example, or breaching ...”

“... be the intention, or part of it, though it would be foolish to claim to know what motivates such self-disfigurement. From the outside, however, he looks like a ghoul, a monstrous apparition, the Ghost of Celebrity Future. As he sang in ‘Thriller’, ‘Night creatures call/And the dead start to walk in their masquerade/There’s no escaping the jaws of the ...”

“... of Hollis Brown’, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ or ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. It is also self-evidently and self-consciously fictive. Many of the recollections are too detailed to be plausible as unadorned memories (whatever they are). Before explaining that he’d travelled to New York from the Midwest in the back ...”

“... its thrust – would have been that, just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, which is a self-evident fact, so you shouldn’t base your opinion of anything else on surfaces or first impressions: you can’t judge an accused man by his physiognomy. Fine. But as the number of books jostling for readers’ attention has grown, publishers have toiled to ...”

“... extremely vague, even in the so-called Act XXX of 1836. The campaign was also an opportunity for self-aggrandisement on the part of some Company officials, most conspicuously Sleeman, who published the so-called ‘standard work on thuggee’, Ramaseeana, or a vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the Thugs (1836). According to a report he wrote in May ...”

“... of the war and the reconstruction of French academic life and institutions, Febvre got his chance. Self-publicising was part of the plan. ‘Cite ourselves,’ he commanded around 1950, ‘don’t lose the opportunity to cite ourselves, to propagate what is essential, that is to say, our keywords. The threefold division of Braudel: milieu, collective ...”

“... Isherwood.) In contrast to his reserve in company, however, Maugham was addicted in his writing to self-disclosure: ‘Most of what one writes is to a greater or lesser degree autobiographical.’ Though his narrative persona was cynical and detached, his books were filled with accounts of his own miserable experiences of childhood, love and marriage; as well ...”

“... ankle-biter, a demon chomper, a rattle-chucker, a rivalrous toad, green and pink and fat with self-concern, and we will often see this distinguished person most clearly in his letters. Saul Bellow knew the type very well and we meet one of them in the shape of Moses Herzog, the eponymous hero of Bellow’s sixth novel, a helpless, epistolary nutcase who ...”

“... is not transcendent but cynical. In St John’s pitch on behalf of poets Ariosto combines cheeky self-interest, a career courtier’s disenchanted take on patronage, and a highly sceptical view of history. If history consists of lies told by writers on behalf of their patrons, according to the author of the fourth Gospel, then … It is characteristic of ...”