“... they were of personal inspiration only in the paradoxical sense that the equivocal convulsions of self abnegation which made up their subject-matter appeared to be mirroring, in what the French term a mise en abyme, my own self-effacing attitude to language as the externalisation of an interiority. (Recently, one of my ...”

“... Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had evolved from a once-famous letter to the Times defending Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam and signed by all or most of those present). One had to pretend that ...”

“... of Comfort’s analysis of Thatcherism, far removed from Coster’s scrupulous probing, is most self-defeating when the author resorts to casual comparisons with Nazi Germany: the security service is the Gestapo, the Conservative Party Conference is ‘the Nuremberg Rally at Blackpool’. ‘They’re slowly imposing censorship, like the late ...”

“... he was in an absurd muddle about it. And it seems that he himself found more enjoyment in writing self-sending-up love-letters, supplemented by occasional moments of teasing dalliance with actresses and other devotees, than in doing what others would regard as the real thing. It is touching, therefore, that Love, outlawed by his metabiological programmes, had ...”

“... make themselves felt. Its subject, who was co-operation itself over public affairs and so self-critical as to be almost embarrassingly dismissive, clammed up over anything remotely to be described as ‘home life’, and the author’s other sources do not seem to have been of much use. Halcrow offers no explanation of this early instance of ...”

“... with innate ideas, thanks to Locke, equipped by Hartley with a psychology which permitted self-conscious development, and popularised by Priestley as a divinely ordained instrument of improvement, ‘pliable man’ stepped forward for inspection. No effort was spared to ensure his supersession of earlier, less malleable models. The dominance of ...”

“... shaped by the paradigms of the West or of Soviet socialist planning have not enhanced a sense of self-determination. This was seen to be a problem not just in Islamic countries but in ‘Third World’ countries generally, and it was this sort of problem that the Non-Aligned movement set out to address. The movement was not always successful and did not get ...”

“... whether or not they fall off. Any writer with DeLillo’s degree of fluency will inevitably risk self-indulgence: a writer who can do anything will sooner or later decide that anything is worth trying to do. To my mind, this self-indulgence shows up in what one might call the middle-period books, from Ratner’s Star ...”

“... When Worsthorne writes of being taken up by Irving Kristol at Encounter in the mid-Fifties, his self-deprecation deserts him as he recalls the lift this gave to his clubland standing: Unquestionably the value of my shares on the stock exchange of journalistic reputations had begun to catch up with Henry’s and John’s [Fairlie and Raymond] if not ...”

“... honestly stated, were narrowly commercial. They were in it for the profit, and save in moments of self-inflation (rather few in Belgium, as it happens), have been little inclined to prate about their civilising mission. Their Congo state and colony paid a grim price for this single-minded interest in profit, and its successor, Zaire, still pays this ...”

“... in 1990, the American historian Paul Breines argues that a significant change took place in the self-image of the American Jew after 1967. Breines examined films, books and magazines in which American Jews had traditionally portrayed themselves as mild, bookish and wise human beings, not given to retaliation or unprovoked violence. After 1967 the Jewish ...”

“... half a million refugees. Yet the recent success of the economic agreements between Knin (the self-proclaimed capital of the Krajina Serbs) and Zagreb disproves the claim that Croatia is analogous to Cyprus. After a relatively short interval, the Serbs of Knin were talking to Zagreb and a degree of trust was established. However frustrating the UN’s ...”

“... and ‘the West’. Ignorance here co-exists only too well with a sort of cultural masochism or self-hatred, where no robust critique of any other religion is possible lest it remind us of the ‘colonial’.Yet within weeks of the original fatwah (now just past its fifth infamous anniversary), and increasingly over the past year or two, the whole grand ...”

“... victor of Kronstadt. All of them – Trotsky via political defeat – came to hate bureaucracies, self-serving oligarchies, shameless proponents of raison d’état. All of them – the anarchists by conviction, Trotsky and Thompson by experience of Stalin and the Cold War respectively – concluded that state bureaucracies, regardless of their ideological ...”

“... Alderman is a member of the community he describes and his book can be read as a collective self-portrait – presented from an inward-looking, religiously Orthodox, politically conservative and rather philistine perspective. Modern British Jewry has little to say about anti-semitism or assimilation, both of which, without distinction, it sees merely as ...”