“... a piece of paper seems to have triumphed not only over sedulous corruption but even over simple self-preservation. Whether this or some even more worrying ground of over-confidence was the reason, it looks like another vindication of the cock-up theory of history – a theory which two decades of practice in public and constitutional law have begun to ...”

“... a man to keep the peace and jails him for life for making a mistake in the heat of the action. Our self-important and ineffectual MPs have let this matter lie. Apart from a case argued on BBC Television in favour of the creation of lesser penalties to meet such occasions, the only protest on the subject that I have heard has come from a spokesman in Ulster who ...”

“... debriefing at the hands of MI5. This theory, however, is vulnerable to that deadly comment on all self-justifying testimony – Mandy Rice-Davies’s ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ Bitov himself has been the most prolific source of conflicting versions of his disappearance in Venice, his appearance in London and his reappearance in Moscow, with each story ...”

“... He enjoys describing his love affairs, but compared with Boswell’s activities these show great self-restraint. He did not have a Dr Johnson to provide sagacious advice about freeing himself from paternal influence. In fact, as those who have seen A Voyage Round My Father on television will realise, this would have been an impossibility, since it is clear ...”

“... and of post Christian humanism is to place at the centre of the imagined universe the thinking and self-conscious animal, this little creature with his Renaissance strut and hard shell of intellectual pride, which shuts him off from immediate responses to the natural order. We need in our imagination to travel far back in time and to reconstruct images of the ...”

“... case, they demonstrate, even at their most hysterical, something different from casting one’s self on a tide of words – especially symbolic epithets like ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘wet’ and ‘cold’ – and trusting to half-remembered cadences out of Shakespeare and Yeats to convey the illusion of meaning. Not the least ardent of Sue Lenier’s ...”

“... however, is remarkable for a style which arches brilliantly between sociological observation and self-delighting irony. This introductory paragraph is emblematic of her technique: Getting a buzz off the stones of Bath, occupying a conspicuous site not fifty yards from the mysterious, chthonic aperture from which the hot springs bubble out of the inner ...”

“... which was approaching the exciting climax to a remarkable and peaceful quest for greater political self-determination. Scotland’s nationalism – expressed most vividly in the extraordinary ten-year advance of the Scottish National Party under its Home Rule banner, but striking a strong chord, too, in Labour, Conservative and Liberal support for political ...”

“... the cult of the Virgin, an insult to organised religion, a criticism of contemporary society and a self-abasing admission that the artist, as a good member of the juste-milieu, has compromised his integrity by selling out to the forces of reaction. Boime supposes that the mural on the left of the altar, the Stella Maris, is a comment on the failure of the ...”

“... femininity Anna could admire but never emulate. The younger daughter had to learn reserve and self-abnegation, to reconcile herself to the elemental unfairness in a parent’s partiality. Her father even mocked her devotion, writing in 1919 to Max Eitingon in Berlin that Anna had opposed Eitingon’s offer of a gift of 3000 Swedish crowns: ‘my daughter ...”

“... of a priori theories of social evolution or historical diffusion, it later developed into a self-consciously non-historical field of study. The basis for this reversal was the argument that the intimate face-to-face, day-to-day interactions of the individuals living together in a local community which provide the basic subject-matter of social ...”

“... combination of gentleman and player, a Coghill who inhabits an academy innocent of competition, self-serving and self-display. It may seem a Utopian fancy, but I think Wain locates it in a magical, rather Arnoldian Oxford that somehow existed alongside the real one, in the good old days. The old days, indeed, preoccupy ...”

“... the ways in which a particular thought form (a ‘consciousness’, as Hegel put it), or again a self-defeating project, can be necessarily involved in or presupposed by a social relationship or other historically-given development. Hegel had one big dark answer to that question; Marxists have lots of active answers, but they tend to scurry off when ...”

“... by his inability to find a real style to go with his success) is perhaps his most complicatedly self-lacerating: there is a clear suggestion that the man’s downfall has more to do with Scotland than with him. But then, on the other hand, who’d want to be an English pouf? There is no figure in Williams’s books who is both big-time and ...”

“... range and variety of reference are exceptional. She also writes, some of the time, with a fervid, self-indulgent miscellaneousness, in a kind of spray of allusions. There are too many one- and two-sentence paragraphs in this book: too many asides appropriate to a lecture, but making for jerky reading on the page. It must be said, indeed, that disjointedness ...”