“... whatever reason, did so knowing they would pay the price ... As often as not, their ostracism was self-imposed; they were their own worst critics. In other words, Victorian England was a society in which – as in Rousseau’s Le Contrat Social – deviants willed their own punishment because they believed that the very existence of society was predicated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... most of it, a broken string. These extras undermine or spook what is otherwise a portrait of two self-satisfied young men in their prime, which had been commissioned and presumably in outline designed by one of them (Dinteville, on the left), and remained in his family for the next 150 years.North’s interpretation of The Ambassadors starts from the implied ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but something deeper, not so much an intellectual as a psychological limitation: a capacity for self-deception with far-reaching political consequences.‘India was in my blood and there was much in her that instinctively thrilled me,’ he told his readers.She is very lovable and none of her children can forget her wherever they go or whatever strange fate ...”

“... under perestroika had first taken outspoken nationalist form. But unlike Russian nationalism, a self-destructive and anti-democratic force that could only lead to the end of the USSR, in Estonia there was no contradiction between the national and democratic movements. All three Baltic states would become democratic republics, but of the trio, elections had ...”

“... 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 ...”