“... is understandable but perilous … it is historically evasive and may, in the worst outcome, prove self-defeating.’ Why so? Mulhern is quite clear about this. For him, as for, say, a group like the Tel Quel group in Paris, criticism is part of the class struggle, an attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie and ‘the dominant culture’. He announces a battle to ...”

“... vivid book, New York Cops Talk Back: A Study of a Beleaguered Minority.1 They used to derive their self-esteem from the belief that they were the guardians of society, the embodiment of its values: they represented right. The police force, moreover, used to be a means by which poor people could climb the social ladder. But now they feel they are no longer ...”

“... would impute any lack of psychic integrity in the man himself. True enough, he was a peculiarly self-contained person whose inner life was always opaque, even to his most intimate companions. But there was no harsh discontinuity or irreconcilable inconsistency in his temperament, and we have no reason to suppose that he was nervously guarding some guilty ...”

“... Prufrock’ was an act of great courage. Ackroyd will say of Eliot in 1920 that his pride and self-preservation ‘did lead Eliot to a most extraordinary caution in both private and public affairs’. Ackroyd speaks of Eliot as ‘a timid man’; he quotes with concurrence Virginia Woolf’s wishing in 1923 that Eliot had more ‘spunk’ in him, and ...”

“... men at table had for Cézanne, or the pleasure we take in the limited palette, calculated, self-referential brush-strokes and subtle asymmetry of Codde’s Young Man, is not to fall victim to an ahistorical taste for 19th-century art for art’s sake (whatever that may be): it is to acknowledge a historical situation. Although this art was produced at ...”

“... which contains a whole range of other alternatives, and their statement is notably free from the self-righteousness which so easily afflicts reformers. The catch about Animal Liberation, however, is that, from the theoretical angle, it is one-legged. Singer is a Utilitarian, grounding the claims of animals on a general human duty to relieve suffering and ...”

“... 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 ...”