“... because how others react will, of course, help decide the direction this whole enterprise of self-definition finally takes. Indeed this is true of almost every aspect of our relations with Japan. It is important that we think carefully before reacting to anything, so sensitive are their antennae to outside response. Should we search for disturbing ...”

“... it contains some lively and interesting passages, it has to be treated with caution as largely self-serving. All this is changing on direct orders from the top. About a year ago, Eduard Shevardnadze, Gromyko’s successor at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, assembled his entire staff to listen to a remarkable in-house address, lasting several hours, in which ...”

“... teacher to do everything. If you want your weans to get homework then give it to them your fucking self.    Gavin said: That actually sounds quite right-wing ye know.    Well it’s meant to be the fucking opposite and it is the fucking opposite.    Gavin nodded. Then:    Gavin gazed at him, then laughed briefly. He looked at Pat but Pat ...”

“... dries you up, or it makes you think you are infallible, or your writing becomes puffed out with self-esteem. (Victor Hugo thought himself superior to both Jesus and Shakespeare.) It is a complication that the imagination can well do without.’ It is the spring of 1993. Gunn is on the list of those who will read at a literary festival in a huge old market ...”

“... had been chased away by the coming of the railway, money and commerce had displaced barter and self-sufficiency, and the inhabitants of the village were no longer peasants but citizens. The place and period will be familiar to readers of George Sand, ‘La Bonne Dame du No-hant’, who lived only ten miles away, and created a timeless portrait of la France ...”

“... of the Irish Home Rule Bill in 1893. The leading City institutions were singularly lacking in self-consciousness, and, then as now, far too busy doing business and earning commissions to worry much about public relations – and no honeypot the size of the Late Victorian City was ever without its flies. There was Barney Barnato, ...”

“... original purity to a society that thrives on a terribly debased version of it. The undertone of self-irony sometimes audible in his earlier work seems largely absent from this book. That is hardly surprising if one considers Bloom’s predecessors, the people who have sought to recover ancient religions that might either supplement or replace the ones we ...”

“... army, obedient, punctual, untainted by education, free from seditious rage, long-suffering, self-sacrificing, grateful for the lowest wage. But a factory was not a regiment. Ruskin is quoted as saying it was ‘easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection among soldiers for the colonel, not so easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection for the proprietor of ...”

“... but had ended up as a humanist mirror-image of His omnipotence. There was something unpleasantly self-promoting about this generous-sounding humanism, which in its haste to praise human uniqueness ignored what we had in common with slugs. Historicism needed to be humbled by the biological and the geographical; we had to be recalled to our ...”

“... to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.’ He is not one for self-analysis, but he says: ‘I was full of self-confidence when I first went to Eton ... Public school and three long years of remorseless nastiness squeezed every last trace of confidence from me. It would take a long time ...”

“... with an apology for the partiality of one’s own perspective. This preliminary admission of self-limitation seems, actually, almost the only cohering aspect of American poetry criticism. Why do English and American poetry at the moment seem so far apart? It was not so long ago that figures like Lowell and Berryman and Plath were integral to the English ...”

“... norm. This new prosperity has affected Italian civic behaviour. The stereotype of the anarchic, self-interested Italian, the ‘rampant egoist, devoid of any sense of society’ has given way to what LaPalombara calls the ‘New Pluralism’ – a new emphasis on voluntarism and an explosion in the number of interest groups and ...”

“... own ministers’ sponge-like attitudes to business interests. The official accommodation of these self-interested private lobbies in a representative democracy contains serious implications which – because of unequal resources – go behind and beyond the proper access of citizens to government. Parliament is filled with paid mouthpieces for private ...”

“... as a sign of inferior intelligence, and probably jealousy as well. He is likely to be short on self-doubt, perhaps even on self-knowledge, and he will tend to regard assistants, or even collaborators, as insignificant means to a necessary end. A good example of a lucky archaeologist was Sir Mortimer Wheeler. His talents ...”

“... Dr Galen, a Hollywood plastic surgeon, is a conjuror for the stars in a Californian version of self-development – ‘A few millimetres shaved off her nose, a couple of ounces of silicone “here and there” became a passport to an entirely new world’; in ‘Rocketfire Red’, Jones skilfully evokes an anonymous waitress’s rough-edged Australian ...”