“... 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 ...”

“... as they lived within their means) a mark of their benevolence; far from indicating an acquisitive self-interest indifferent to the interest of the nation at large, it provided the opportunity to increase the sum of happiness in the nation by increasing the number of those in employment. This Hogarth believed that as Britain became richer by commerce, it would ...”

“... these novels so brilliantly funny – a lucid and ironic awareness of how pointless and manic and self-centred this talk is. Talk is a kind of doomed buffoonery, wearing funny clothes and taking tumbles because it doesn’t know how to get another job, or if there is another job, anywhere. The books are crowded with voices and short on punctuation, but are ...”

“... and after this well-known, much publicised and highly controversial royal liaison, she was a self-made career woman and a self-supporting working mother. For Mrs Jordan was the greatest comic actress of her day – adored by theatre-goers in London and the provinces; acclaimed by Hazlitt, Byron and Coleridge; cartooned ...”

“... and more a question of masquerade, what the authors call ‘female female impersonation’, a self-conscious performance of gender via costume (Millay’s girlish frocks, Moore’s cape and tricorn hat) and metaphor. They see this phenomenon more clearly in poetry than fiction: ‘since fiction by definition entails figuring, while poets have often tended ...”

“... thought that white children also should know about heroic African-Americans, it ends up with the self-fulfilling prediction that they will remain separated from their black contemporaries not just by money and life-chances but by a ‘difference of culture’. As Alan Ryan has pointed out, the people who wave the banners of multiculturalism typically pride ...”

“... More recently, the BBC precipitately withdrew a programme on Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher. Self-censorship has replaced censorship from outside – where the issues at least tend to become known. Self-censorship operates in the dark. Self-censorship also signals a loss of political ...”

“... suavely hyped than his being grounded on the side of the sophisticated. His work is obsessively self-reflexive – ‘but am I Art?’ is its central question. Almost from the start he investigated how to make verse out of texts that (often explicitly) comment on themselves and on other texts. An early poem, ‘Plague Graves’, signals a debt to Hughes and ...”

“... up an important point too easily glossed over: that almost all of America’s dominant cultural self-perceptions have involved, if only implicitly, a contrast with Europe, for better or worse. In short, Vance is a sort of Tocqueville in reverse, who is ultimately truer to the Tocquevillean impulse than many of his more provincial American Studies ...”