“... character of limited intelligence and scant scruple, remarkable only for his gigantic powers of self-deception. But no amount of academic documentation is likely to dissuade people a hundred years hence from seeing him as the very mirror of a tragic prince – an ikon of modern royalty as exemplified by Sickert’s dazzling portrait painted, at the time of ...”

“... a case of Titania and Bottom!’ The courtship of this super-extraordinary pair – ‘two active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public cause,’ as H.G. Wells characterised them in The New Machiavelli – was the oddest romance in the Fabian calendar and a triumph for Sidney’s policy of gradualism. Beatrice was 34 at the time of their ...”

“... economic injury.’ Capitalism may deliver the goods, but it does so in a way that undermines the self-esteem and capacity for self-realisation of most people. The inherent ugliness of capitalism ensures that there is a perpetual impetus towards socialism, but contemplation of actually existing socialism perpetually tends ...”

“... irritation. Those who use it are usually complacent or ignorant, or both, and guilty of the covert self-congratulation of those who have drawn prize numbers in the lottery of life. One who uses the term is the Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the phantom Foreign Office in St James’s Square. For reasons of economy or snobbery or ...”

“... and political. ‘Drawings after Circuit’, 1972. Serra’s drawings are not pure, perfect, self-sufficient, suprematist or minimalist forms; they are built things. They need a bit of packing here, a bit of bog there; they need the viewer to act on them. The earliest work in the exhibition is the text drawing Verb List (1967-68), a lexicon of more than ...”

“... too enthusiastic, too alien – she seems to long to go back to some version of college, to the self-rejuvenating Dawn School, or to Folk School: ‘I am going to Folk School/to learn how to be/one of my people.’ She has a Dionysian desire to dissolve boundaries between persons and longs for the kind of fellowship promised by a church; the trouble is she ...”

“... for stanzas might be somehow related – a stanza being, in Joseph Brodsky’s words, ‘a self-generating device’, and one whose original mnemonic purpose has, for the most part, gone the way of the barouche. On Balance, Sinéad Morrissey’s sixth collection, subjects mechanical devices and engineering marvels to formal constraints ...”

“... that before writers dared to offer to their readership stories which were intended to be wholly self-contained and self-explanatory, they had to have confidence in the ability of these readers to get the hang, rapidly, of a variety of narrative techniques and their effects – something that could only come about as a ...”

“... which non-theological, immanent values and ambitions predominate. Prose fiction, with its highly self-conscious adieu to epic-fabulous presumptions by Cervantes, constructs contexts of totality, related to those in the economic systems of mercantile capitalism and to those aimed at by positivist science. This ‘totality’ has, in Hegel, a ...”

“... like the gallery, is devoted to Art Brut, a movement that insists on the value of art made by self-taught artists, including patients in psychiatric hospitals. I visited the exhibition by accident, wandering in during a weekend in Paris, and found pictures of tree roots made up of twisted and tortured bodies; of Adam and Eve stripped of their skin, so ...”

“... diametric contrast stands the characteristic tone of native commentary. Most languages have some self-critical locution, usually a wordplay or neologism, to indicate typical national defects. Germans can cite Hegel’s contemptuous description of local identity politics, Deutschdumm; the French deplore the vauntings of franchouillardise; Peruvians term a ...”

“... on the windswept islands to the north. The sealer communities provided a model of anarchic self-sufficiency. As one observer lamented in 1817, They are complete savages, living in bark huts like the natives, not cultivating anything, but living entirely on kangaroos, emus and small porcupines, and getting spirits and tobacco in barter for the skins ...”

“... of school desegregation as oppressors. In a peculiarly American version of victimology and self-reinvention, they invoked their ancestors’ tales of workplace signs that read ‘No Irish Need Apply,’ and claimed that through hard work and gumption they had risen above oppression while blacks continued to wallow in ...”

“... historians use other definitions. I’m inclined to believe that ‘free labour’, understood as self-ownership, is more useful. Wage labour is a reasonable definition, however, and it helps clarify much of what was at stake in the Civil War. This precise definition of capitalism, however, coexists uneasily with their use of ‘slavery’ as a catch-all ...”

“... The rhetoric of both men seems to be shot through with plaintive rural nostalgia for the small, self-contained life of the village; for a world where ‘frontline services’ are ‘delivered’ from within the community by the church, the WI and the Over Sixties Club, where no one dies unnoticed by his neighbours, the pub serves as a nightly local ...”