“... 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 ...”

“... of certain unworldly townlands in Donegal, along with the rest of the country. In his view, the self-contained community might grow stagnant and pigheaded: ‘Nothing was right with his people ... unless it was what went on always.’ One of his novels, The Big Windows (1955), is set in a crabbed valley in which life takes a turn for the better at the ...”

“... life in that one body.’ Mrs Lassiter is a suburban housewife whose daydreams take the form of self-pity at her own arrested development. Faintheartedly she scratches about for some romance in her life, and the best she can do is the young instructor at the driving school, a lovely young boy with the mental age of ten, which is her own. A lack, anywhere in ...”

“... never been demonstrated by Weissbort, nor by anyone else who parrots the judgment as if it were self-evident. Philip Larkin has attracted enough devotees over the years for this slap-happy judgment to cut no ice so far as he is concerned; others of us – and my own special interest is too obvious for me to declare it – are bitterly though resignedly ...”

“... must suppose that nothing more is needed. But this could only be correct if modern economies were self-adjusting systems that didn’t need any management at all. I am driven to the conclusion that such a view – that economies are self-righting organisms which never under any circumstances need management at all – did ...”

“... great advantage of The Same and Not the Same is that it seems unlikely to create a readership of self-made men who believe they have original ideas, after reading one or two popular essays. The book points out that to acquire the simplest possible view of a carbon atom or molecule takes some ten years, not only of learning, listening and reading, but also of ...”