When June first sees the impoverished apartment where Hector lives, "she wondered if this was a life that had befallen him or whether he had sentenced himself to it, as people sometimes do, in punishment right or not".
It was as if, at a certain moment (I do not know why or when), he had sentenced himself to imprisonment in some strict regime camp, and was now rigidly enforcing that regime.
Crucially, like so many of the people who catalysed the postwar British arts scene, he was gay, but also fantastically uncomfortable about it: to quote his friend, fellow Cheltenham old boy and biographer Gavin Lambert, he effectively sentenced himself "to grievous psychological stress for life".
Even if he somehow manages to remain uncaught, he has already sentenced himself to, at best, perpetual exile.
Hence, West believes he has not sentenced himself to a career's end in small-market purgatory.
"He seems to have joyfully sentenced himself to a life of community service," writes Dennis Burke, the executive director of Arizona Common Cause.
Humanity is frail: the manager serves the meat himself, but, tempted (cop and felon in one), he sentences himself to whistle while his waiters pass free and silent with vegetables and dessert.
But we believe that if Mr. Clinton continues to press the public toward a choice between his political interests and a respect for the law and its agents, he will be sentencing himself to a crippled Presidency and to a crabbed and unrevered retirement.
Ovenden had fully expected to be jailed for his crimes, and in an interview with the Guardian the day before he was sentenced compared himself to Oscar Wilde.
