“... genocide of the Amerindians) is not even a secret from schoolchildren, fed though they are on the self-censored and sanitised work of academics who identify with the Establishment and cover up its crimes, for whatever careerist or Freudian motives of their own. James Hunter, author of the classic Making of the Crofting Community (1976), has credited Prebble ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... notebook on transmutation and begun to develop a theory of evolution which, by finding in nature a self-acting and self-generating power to explain the emergence of species without need of special or continuous creation, effectively turned God into what the authors neatly call the ‘absentee landlord’ of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... education and its reform tended to lay stress on the importance of the study of history. At the self-same period in which some present-day women’s historians have detected a widening gulf between the private sphere of middle and upper-class women, and the public role of their menfolk, women from precisely these social backgrounds were being urged to read ...”

“... a poem which raises the whole issue of ‘maturity’. That ponderous term, stale with Leavisian self-importance, may seem inappropriate when applied to a poem which takes its dramatis personae from popular commodity culture and which is dazzlingly funny in its idiom and execution, its line running on so energetically that it transforms its feminine rhymes ...”

“... onto a screen of what is actual and present by means of the poet’s tactic ... That godlike self, never known before, comes into focus and vanishes again in one quick shift of view. As the planes of vision jump, the actual self and the ideal self and the difference between them ...”

“... writers on manuscript material and the ‘scientific’ study of early printed texts. As self-made scholars, their careers are heroic. Wise left school early and had his higher education from the Camden Road Mutual Improvement Society. Neither went to university. Each achieved more single-handedly, in the way of scholarship, than whole departments of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”