“... class oppression for overt war, while announcing the imminent arrival of the freedom, justice and self-fulfilment preached by the idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one ...”

“... know (and note how carefully all five of the senses are brought into it). But it is also an act of self-definition, MacNeice claiming a role for himself, the Poet as Ordinary Bloke. The particulars in the Zoo passage sound ordinary enough, but the telling of them is highly poetical, from the allusion to Hopkins’s sonnet at the beginning to the swirl of ...”

“... the left apparently come round to these Liberal causes? The cynic would, no doubt, allege blatant self-interest. Losing any hope that Labour can possibly win the next election on our existing electoral system, the Left have now come to see that PR is their only way of returning a Labour government to power. This cynical view would also explain the glaring ...”

“... also a risky, flamboyant, long-sustained star performance, complete with pratfalls and buffoonery, self-mockery and self-castigation. Anything she dishes out she is more than ready to take; and as a performer, she has never shirked making an idiot of herself, or washing bloody knickers in public. The querulous critic can be ...”

“... southern Argentina. And he is certainly not the embodiment of Indian aspirations for justice and self-realisation: ‘After several hours we were forced into conversation with the only other white people on board, the only people we could talk to since the wary Indians offered no more than monosyllabic replies to questions from outsiders. In fact, these kids ...”

“... lesser eccentricity; the rumours that he fed his children a diet of potatoes to accustom them to self-denial and habitually ate his own dinner in dyspeptic solitude are vehemently denied: all these tales are traced back to a disgruntled former nurse. To compensate for the loss of these gratifying slanders, Barker supplies innumerable instances of ...”

“... of art after 1923 (a partial one, as it turned out) is attributed here to his conception of the self as an essence that is sullied by the process of creation. (Chess was a cleaner alternative – what was visible exactly mirrored the thought behind it, itself subject to preordained rules.) Seigel also invokes the bohemian tradition of declaring oneself an ...”

“... Shaw before him, he has obviously been convinced by his own brilliance. There are few signs of self-doubt here. He begins with a strong affirmation about the importance of ‘the battle of ideas’, suggesting that parties which win it can ‘stay in office for a generation’. Yet he maintains that, even after 18 years in government, ‘Conservatives can ...”

“... indifferent to this misery, and that our daily thinking about our duty to others is marked by self-serving irrationality. We typically believe that we do have a moral duty to rescue others who are at risk, especially where this can be done without great cost to ourselves. For example, most people would agree that a bystander has a duty to rescue a child ...”

“... British coal then suffered a decline in production and employment so nicely paced, and a series of self-inflicted wounds so exquisitely contrived, that the Second World War and the period of reconstruction which followed were marked by one continuing crisis of productivity. Though some sort of stability was seemingly restored to a steadily shrinking ...”

“... letters, more convincingly argued that Thomas equally wished to preserve his marriage, and that self-blame (as ever) dominated his state of mind. Edward Thomas’s obsessions were rarely monorail: they exhausted all the possibilities and exhausted him. Frost conceived ‘The Road Not Taken’ as a satire on his friend’s scrupulosity about the ...”

“... which might well have led him, had he kept his health, to have given up writing poetry altogether. Self-criticism never really helped him, and he could not see how the incongruous factors in ‘St Agnes Eve’ nonetheless worked together to make it the kind of masterpiece adored by the Victorians. Porphyro, ‘brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume’ in ...”

“... a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were his brothers much better. Probably, as David Cannadine has written, the lives, loves and morals of George III’s children made them ‘the most unloved royal generation in English history’; though the previous ...”

“... their destruction. He, too, documents a sad tale of personal betrayal, compromised principle and self-deception, emplotting his own story as Clinton’s campaign aide, director of communications and senior adviser as an uneven, but ultimately friendship-shattering process of disillusionment with the man whose career he once so ardently forwarded. Where ...”

“... else in the lobby is a giant lizard. Material which in other hands would be solipsistic and self-serving – there is, after all, nothing as boring as other people’s drug stories – has always been anchored by Thompson’s journalistic skill. His gift for reporting, his humour and political sense have made his ‘gonzo’ version of the New ...”