“... action: but it will not explain the personal commitment. Given Adam Smith’s insistence that self-love was a more influential mechanism of social betterment than benevolence, and his scepticism about the probity of officials or the likelihood of a man working as hard for the public as he would for himself, the conscientiousness with which he did his work ...”

“... the letters do add a dimension to our reading of Hardy. He comes out so plainly as the tenacious, self-interested Dorset man of modest station, more or less self-educated, determined to keep his end up, intellectually and socially, though neither his ideas nor his social graces were exactly distinguished. What distinguished ...”

“... on him more strongly than guilt; he is too anxious to secure an explanation; what appears to be self-analysis is more often a deployment of cliché to bolster his own myth, the myth of the bent branch, the wrong turning. ‘No one,’ he complains, ‘wants to believe ever that I am just an ordinary man come to an extraordinary and overwhelming ...”

“... distinguish the Ulster Protestant identity from the identity of groups who have made good, through self-defence, their title to self-determination as national states. In the last analysis, readiness to fight for ‘freedom, religion and laws’ – a way of life – is the ultimate determinant. Loyalist selfishness, so ...”

“... any rate, nothing cataclysmic takes place that will not finally be redeemed and retrieved. As the self-educated inventor Fred T. Barry assures our eponymous hero: ‘Human being [sic] always treat blizzards as though they were the end of the world.’ But the raging storms that have swept over the plains of the Middle West are due to vanish without trace, or ...”

“... war. The United States became the champion of Argentine membership, while Molotov, ideologically self-righteous, and quoting at length from Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, cited her manifold disqualifications. But the line of collusive solidarity held. Argentina was voted in as soon as White Russia and the Ukraine had been confirmed as suitable peace-loving ...”

“... his outlay of compassion, squandering now, though, less care on the universe than on himself. Self-pity became his constant theme. In place of the rather studied, substanceless, arabesque contortions of the early verse, Berryman offered vital human drama – either his own or that of his serviceable alter ego,‘Henry’. The improvement in readability is ...”

“... public art, although these paintings, like the Chrysler Building and the Rockefeller Centre, were self-referential. They did not glorify the city, or victories, or political alliances, or history, or the land, but the artist himself and his creativity: art galleries apart, was there a natural home for them? In 1958, when Mies van der Rohe and Philip ...”

“... epithet ‘bigot’, the validity of this description is not – as its users seem to think – self-evident. Bruce is at pains to demonstrate, for the benefit of a secular audience, that religious belief cannot be dismissed as unreasonable. It may be strictly ‘irrational’, but any sociology which failed to accept the centrality of religion in many ...”

“... so that it might grow in its own true way’. Mark Mathabane’s book, by contrast, is not at all self-critical and never escapes from or transcends its adopted styles. This is very much a book for an American audience. At one point he successfully manipulates an Afrikaner by telling ‘the bastard what he wanted to hear’. His book tells Americans what they ...”

“... FitzGerald’s perception of the common Puritan tradition. ‘Rootlessness and the search for self-definition’, she argues, are ‘permanent and characteristic features of American life’, the result of ‘occupational and geographic mobility and the loose weave of the society’. Jerry Falwell, the Rajneeshee, the gay activists of San Francisco and ...”

“... about hospitals,’ she said. And why should she not? Pym is wonderfully open-eyed about the self-proclamation of the caring and compassionate lobby, and the way in which, in life as in fiction, its roles get adopted and its fantasies acted out. A natural do-gooder, like most of Pym’s leading characters, the heroine cannot help wondering if there might ...”

“... comes to terms with one’s past.’ How very American, I thought: the quest for roots; self-measurement against the promise of the past; the reunion as a personal and collective stock-taking. A painful business. Meanwhile, however, Tony was persuading me. As a student of American culture, who had had a particular college experience in the United ...”

“... themselves that Hitler’s Germany was a place where the Prussian virtues of fairness and self-restraint could still flourish, and who discovered their mistake too late. About the exiles for whom the East Prussia they lost but still see in dreams continues to exist on a plane beyond reality. But it is also about what did happen in this ...”

“... Chesterton hated. This genial tribute from the champion of Orthodoxy with a capital O to the self-styled ‘Iconoclast’ (Bradlaugh’s pen name) was not simply another piece of glittering paradox, one more instance of Chesterton’s determination to startle the reader at all costs. On the contrary, that was the way most people saw Bradlaugh. From the ...”