“... taste for foreign fashions was seen as an affront to class distinctions as well as to national self-sufficiency. Although the import and sale of Indian cotton was banned in Britain and France for much of the 18th century, it continued to be shipped via Britain to Africa, where some of it was bartered for slaves, and then on to the ...”

“... they don’t. They go in one ear and go straight to the nervous system, eating away co-ordination, self-confidence and self-respect.’ Today’s referees have their decisions replayed and dissected long after the game has finished.Other sports seem to be faring better. Rugby’s TMO (Television Match Official) is the gold ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... manipulator of his fellow senators. His political gifts were perfectly suited to a small club of self-important men whom he could get at one on one. He alternately flattered them shamelessly and openly threatened them, never missing an opportunity to get them on the hook for something they either coveted or feared. Everyone knew that Johnson was the conduit ...”

“... could call it a lip’. Before she could allow the mountains in ‘Arrival at Santos’ to be ‘self-pitying’, she had to impose the words ‘who knows?’; in ‘The Armadillo’, when she mentioned ‘the stars’, she had to correct herself to say ‘planets, that is’; in ‘Sandpiper’, she wrote: He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his ...”

“... and brought and kept them hereIs lost: and for a while they join a terrible equality,Are virtuous, self-sacrificing, free:And so insidious is this libertyThat those surviving it will bearAn even greater servitude to its root:Believing they were whole, while they were brave;That they were rich, because their loot was great;That war was meaningful, because they ...”

“... so small, because it completely accepts the nobility and its right to exist. There is a necessary self-contradiction here: a party that would reject the nobility as well as belief in the laws would straightaway have the entire population behind it, but such a party cannot come into being, because no one dares to reject the nobility. We live on the razor’s ...”

“... in Manchester, who was sacked in June for selling too diverse a range of books. Will Self took up the cause to have him reinstated, but at the time of writing, the manager of the shop in question is called Andy Rossiter. Now Waterstone’s have been criticised for trying to force small publishers into selling all their titles to the chain at a ...”

“... Paume and carried a tube of red paint with which to threaten sharp-suited gropers on the Metro. A self-portrait from 1963 shows the teenage artist on the cusp, turning from Cookham schoolgirl to Juliette Gréco: a headscarf, knotted Sloane-style under the chin, with a 1960s fringe poking out at the top; steady look, quizzical mouth.England has been slower ...”

“... departments in the less disciplined disciplines, and marginal to society as a whole: the self-absorption of the guild and its detachment from social reality may be gauged by the occasionally overheard reflection that literary theory, as practised by expensive pedagogues in universities of the affluent West, is a ‘revolutionary’ act. Rousseau’s ...”

“... his high-wire act of slumming it with socially unavowable desires while lording it with his social self-image: Charlus skates on ice, dangerously but also skilfully, though beneath the ice madness always threatens (‘madman’ recurs as a description of him in this mood). But if anachronistic ‘camping’ of the text can produce misreadings, all is forgiven ...”

“... notion of ‘capital in general’, or his speculative belief that history was a vehicle for the self-realisation of humanity. The latter notion was derived from Hegel. Like Hegel, Marx offered a logically incoherent view of history, a half-way house between a fully religious theory and a fully secularised theory. For both, history was the embodiment of ...”

“... of a male hierarchy, spends the novel lamenting his lot as the perennial victim of women who are self-centred, bossy, exploitative and vengeful. Amis’s subject is not man’s objective hold on power in our times, but his morale; tougher-minded women readers are going to feel gratified rather than insulted by Stanley’s witness, because he is delightfully ...”

“... the Palestine part of the agreement would be much more than cosmetic. There was going to be no self-determination for the Palestinians. Once again, the Israelis had succeeded in bending the Americans to their will. Peace between Israel and Egypt would have been universally welcomed, had it been linked to the achievement of a comprehensive settlement. But ...”

“... was he demasculated? He looks pretty tough from the word go (even Norden describes him as ‘a self-assured, goal-orientated fellow’). The dismal equation of disability with an internal defectiveness is so thorough that it seems to have bewitched him into overlooking a rare exception, where the character who is physically impaired is the one to embody ...”