“... it is worth quoting Habermas’s position at some length: ‘After Auschwitz our national self-consciousness can be derived only from the better traditions of our history, a history that is not unexamined but appropriated critically. The context of our national life, which once permitted incomparable injury to the substance of human solidarity, can be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and is, I have to admit, fairly tenuous. These words might in themselves be merely ironic: the self-made man proud of his personal achievement who stresses the obscurity of his origins is an American stereotype. But Woodward is not American, and we know that he means no irony from the way he commends others among his colleagues: Captain Paul Hoddinott of ...”

“... perverse historical imagination. For all his attachment to documentary research, he took a self-conscious pride in his historian’s ‘green fingers’ – in the fact that he often guessed the truth of what had happened in a particular historical setting long before the archives laid it bare. ‘How do I manage as a historian?’ he wrote to his ...”

“... to the folklore of the Cotswolds, London and Warwickshire, occasionally straying outside these self-imposed borders but always arguing with rigour and exactitude. Particularly helpful is the way in which key concepts such as ‘popular’ and ‘puritan’ receive a detailed explanation of the meanings they have attracted; the French derivations of some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and not one made by Charles Higham, whose moral fervour in telling this wretched story twangs with self-righteousness. There’s talk of ‘moral cesspools’ and ‘man-hungry, tweedy heiresses’ – it’s a world where God and Charles Higham sit in judgment and everybody gets their just deserts. You might think that a man whose lovers include Katharine ...”

“... with the oppressor.’ Mrs Ellis, like almost all missionaries in English fiction, is self-deluded and repressed. She sets her captive to work in a steam laundry for repentant prostitutes. But Lily, whose wants are really very simple – a protector, a baby, a business of her own – is resilient. She goes with, instead of against, the spirit of ...”

“... One of the aims of anthropology,’ Richard Rudgley says, ‘is to understand the self by way of the other.’ Are we to take it that if the Koryaks of Siberia had a high old time on the fly-agaric – or on the recycled urine of a fly-agaric consumer – we too should stock up on magic mushrooms? Rudgley maintains that humans have ‘a universal need for liberation from the restrictions of mundane existence, satisfied by experiencing altered states of consciousness ...”

“... and at the same time ‘at the disposal of life’. In this sense Alice seems gloriously self-satisfied. Indeed, emerging as she does at unexpected moments she seems virtually self-created. Surrounded by low-keyed temperaments, she brilliantly dominates the whole book, but that, surely, was what the author ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”