“... say stuffy figure, it was on account of these limitations. He became a Scotch gentleman of a very self-satisfied Edinburgh, having been a ruthlessly self-critical young man with scurvy spots on his fingers and wind in his stomach. David Miller has lucidly separated ‘the philosophical and ideological elements in Hume’s ...”

“... interest me more than theories’: people may indeed interest him, but the book displays a self-satisfaction which seems to have denied him much understanding of them. Alvarez would now appear to be flatly contradicting what he told us in The Savage God. Referring there to a time ‘many months’ before our separation, he wrote of his intention to ...”

“... transferred from oneself to a malignant world, there is no cause for personal reproach or loss of self-esteem. But while the psychological functions of compulsive exculpation are commonplace, the ability to convince others is a good deal more impressive. Thatcher’s capacity to project her own fantasy as received wisdom is the crux of this election. The ...”

“... that human societies will grow up in intelligible phases as they mature towards a final full self-consciousness in which the conflicts of history are resolved; the evolution of reflective intelligence is to be the driving force. An offshoot of this philosophy is the Marxist theory of history, properly supplied with both direction and driving force, which ...”

“... and the economic power of the central as opposed to the subordinated peripheral regions become self-reinforcing. The central regions exercised their power through the market, where the periphery was subject to greater state and bureaucratic control. The effect of the Industrial Revolution was only to enhance the market power of the centre by creating the ...”

“... of whom normally stopped short of expulsion – but this on the whole was a contentedly self-regarding officer corps recruited mainly from the so-called public schools, entirely at one with their cult of ‘character’ and sportiness and with the ‘county’s’ cult of horsemanship (see especially the general on page 66 ‘whose admiration for ...”

“... now have a laureate. The immense success of the two Mole books and their spin-offs is a tribute to self-awareness.* The public, like a man who finds his symptoms are no mere concatenation but a syndrome, need no longer suspect itself of hypochondria. Sue Townsend’s descriptions ring true, the word is out: kids, parents, pets and geriatrics are all in this ...”

“... lose, it seemed quite likely that the Labour Party would find their defeat an occasion for further self-laceration. Accusations would fly from left to right ... treachery ... stab in the back ... betrayal of the working class ... It is early days yet, of course, and Mr Scargill’s merciful absence from our television screens for the last two months does not ...”

“... in proportion to its social and political implications. Each thought the rightness of his views self-evident: Nabokov maintained this with serious gaiety, Wilson with stubbornness. An instance of the latter is the critic’s attitude to what he regarded as abuse of language: he had no time for arguments about evidence of usage, and treated writers who ...”

“... is missing. Her personal writings have more the nature of declarations and manifestos than self-communings. We have no idea, for example, of the process of reflection or recollection that led her to the Catholic Church; her confirmation seems to have been a sort of jamboree. Her friends, who were numerous, were met chiefly at enormous tea-parties or ...”

“... with her mother and sister, a fervent High Anglican. The keynote which Pusey and Keblehad set was self-sacrifice. To find enough to sacrifice and to suffer for, ‘not to keep back or count or leave’ – the same impulse as Eliot’s ‘Teach us to care and not to care’ – became her prayer in extremity. She saw herself as a stranger and a pilgrim in ...”

“... Dr Wormell got to know Seeley’s ideas and patterns of thought intimately, but his more private self must have been hard to crack. He kept no diary and there is little record of his emotional history, or even the small beer of his social and professional activities. But there is enough to form a picture of an earnest, highly-strung and rather withdrawn ...”

“... in the Savoy Hotel to sit in a chair which immediately collapsed. Coward was his charming, urbane self in helping me to my feet, but the incident did not help to restore my self-confidence. I have never been flat on the floor in front of Gore but I have often felt that the happening was imminent. Who, one wonders, is ...”

“... the months and years of research which must have gone into producing the book, Wolfe is remarkably self-effacing in the way he tells the story. He simply never appears in it. This is entirely appropriate, somehow, for the story is ultimately one about self-transcendence: how we hunger for it, and how our technology serves ...”

“... reasons insupportable even for most of the hawks. Not moral suasion but calculated national self-interest ended the war in Vietnam. Similarly, it is true, as Halberstam alleges, that while television did well enough with racial problems in the South, where the legal status of segregation made the issues visible and offered chances for staged, ritualised ...”