“... affliction of her deare Husband, & all her Relations; but of none in this world more than my self, who lost the most excellent, & most estimable friend, that ever liv’d: I cannot but say my very Soule was united to hers, & that this stroake did peirce me to the utmost depth.’ During the years in which Evelyn saw Margaret most frequently the diary is ...”

“... books division of Random House. She attributed her career advances to Steinberg’s coaching in self-assertiveness, but explained that she had lost her job because of him as well. He threw out manuscripts she brought home from the office. Her black eyes and broken bones could not have helped much at work, nor could the steady diet of cocaine Joel ...”

“... without a moment’s hesitation. The first, of course, is Dr Owen himself, whose absence of self-doubt is almost as awesome as Mrs Thatcher’s. The other, I am left to assume, is the wholly admirable Debbie Owen, who personifies (and I am quite serious here) all three of the Platonic virtues of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. One of the redeeming features ...”

“... even of the best art. As Philip Kerr has perceived, and embodied in his choice of extracts, a self-consciousness about truth goes with scepticism about it to produce the modern science of propaganda. Truth is the first casualty in war, whether hot or cold; when Churchill remarked that truth in wartime was ‘so precious that she should always be attended ...”

“... Instead, they have become an underclass trapped in ghettos which (in Lemann’s words) their ‘self-destructive behaviour ... drug use, out-of-wedlock childbearing, dropping out of school’ have turned into ‘among the worst places to live in the world’. What went wrong? It certainly wasn’t that American blacks lacked ...”

“... for thinking they can achieve it when so many others have failed are swathed in obscurity and self-deception. Adrian Oldfield’s eloquent evocation of the civic republican tradition and Jonathan Boswell’s path-breaking analysis of the links between the values of community and the imperatives of an advanced economy should be read against this ...”

“... idea of Modernism encourages us to think of experiment, not as a constant focus of creativity and self-assertion throughout history, but as the product of a specific (if undefinable) historical crisis. No doubt such ideas have themselves been a focus of creativity and self-assertion throughout history. But some commentators ...”

“... some ways as politically immature as himself felt the need to look to the Ascendancy class for the self-confidence and social prestige available from no other source. Parnell came not only from a governing élite but from a family which had played a leading role in the assertion of Irish, if principally Protestant, nationality in the days of the ...”

“... to Roger Lewis himself, for The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is above all a writer’s essay in self-portraiture. Readers of Lewis’s previous book, Stage People, might have expected as much, for he hinted at his own eccentric theory of biography there in an ominous aside. A propos Citizen Kane, he remarked: ‘Welles knew ... that any man is too complex ...”

“... with the sense that these locutions have been carefully chosen and placed by the speaker’s adult self. This produces an acoustic and visual doubling, so words and scenes are presented simultaneously from the past looking forward, and from the present looking back – an effect introduced in the starting poem, ‘On Our Marks’, which concludes: At the end ...”

“... English, presumably intended as a sign of her own education, rarely penetrates a self-imposed haze of Christmas card smugness: ‘For ignorance is criminal / In this enlightened day, / So let us all get busy / When once we’ve found the way.’ Apart from one or two stirring numbers, the music flounders and sprawls, clutching at a gravity ...”

“... of aesthetic value are routinely bypassed. Of the two critics under review, Malcolm Bradbury is a self-conscious progressive, but he writes the old kind of history. D.J. Taylor is a self-conscious reactionary whose book is a rather strange example of the new kind. Taylor’s belief, set out bluntly in his introduction, is ...”

“... thing to do. It is dominant, as they say in the rationality business. That doesn’t merely seem self-evident, it is self-evident, or so most readers will say to themselves. The second principle needs a little cultivation, for it is best put in terms of probabilities. In one version, when you are uncertain what will ...”

“... family regime of ‘black-bloodedness’ (a term which Charles Tennyson popularised) ‘the boyish self-confidence disappeared and Alfred became subject to those moods of self-torment and remorse which are not uncommon in boys of sensitive nature.’ Happily in later life, the poet was able gradually ‘to free himself from ...”

“... railroad. Each chapter deals with an aspect of his publishing career: police reports, plagiarism, self-advertisements and financing. Bloch’s main point of contemporary reference is Balzac’s Illusions perdues. Finding a mirror for Migne’s reality in the Comédie humaine is not without its dangers and induces a suspicion that Migne himself may not have ...”