“... with its own products. Even One Hundred Years of Solitude, which sets out in such a drivingly self-sufficient way, eventually communicates, through the uniformity of its motifs and style, the narrowness of self – sufficiency – its solitude. Garcia Marquez has said that he was thinking about One Hundred Years of ...”

“... neglect Scottish affairs – showed that in the extreme circumstances of prolonged depression the self-help concepts of thrift, industry and self-supporting labour were annulled by the inadequacy of welfare. Professor Smout sums up: ‘what availed respectability if you ended up sleeping on a pile of straw and queuing for a ...”

“... achievement. I’m not sure that Lisa/Anna, as a character, holds together so well – a divided self whom we never know intimately; a casualty at first of her psyche and then of history. But if we don’t know her well enough, she has her own moment of triumph when she knows herself; and what this means to her, on a visit to her old home in Odessa, is a ...”

“... an Army medical profile, showing signs of ‘expediency, shyness, suspiciousness, forthrightness, self-sufficiency and high anxiety’. ‘It cannot be overstressed,’ Geraghty writes, ‘that the contemporary SAS is an instrument of psychological warfare.’ The winning of hearts and minds that was to become a catchword in Vietnam was a vital part of their ...”

“... comme on parlait à Sparte’ may seem peculiarly apposite to his work, but Sparta was in the air. Self-immolation, the theatrical gesture and its bombastic explanation were the stock-in-trade of every hack writer. Since David’s pictures could not speak and he himself did not get a forum for his sermonising until he was elected to the Convention, his public ...”

“... significant inroads into the problem of world hunger. All this was accompanied by a good deal of self-gratifying propaganda from scientists on the subject of their contribution to human welfare: the Green Revolution was seen as accumulating credit which might one day cancel the moral debit of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.2 Between 1970 and 1974, the United Nations ...”

“... the style of diplomatic rather than university history) certainly pointed out how much effort at self-reform went on in the early Victorian period. Work on Oxford networks has brought out the importance of the Oriel College Noetics, of which Thomas Arnold was the principal luminary. Other writings have dealt with student movements and the revival of ...”

“... as well as poetry, is persistently paradoxical. Full of gravitas and symbolism yet pervasively self-critical and ironic, his works elude and exasperate us, for, as Enright wittily pointed out, we expect the monumental to stand still. Thomas Mann, who has fared better abroad than his compatriot and coironist, consistently resorted to paradox when describing ...”

“... the professor. A gasp of outrage turns instantly to maternal tenderness for a man so childish and self-centred in his treatment of her. Her own vanity, the knowledge that a discussion of her feelings will be blocked by charges of hysteria, of behaving just like his wife, make it impossible for her to continue with the affair. The ‘great love’ is ...”

“... excellence, for the gesture that contrives an exact requirement, and which can be achieved only by self-discipline and practice.’ And it was three months since I’d seen Hoddle and Ardiles. So off I went again, this time to Highbury on New Year’s Day, for Arsenal v. Spurs. Since this is the key grudge-match of the year, I ought to have known better; on ...”

“... distinction (which, of course, would be untenable), but an existential one: the difference between self and other. To be in touch with reality is to be able to experience the world outside ourselves as outside ourselves, and this is an experience which novels, among other things, have it in their power to give us. Iris Murdoch’s novels do not notably give us ...”

“... thousands of brave citizens who opposed or defied them. They appear to shrink from looking some self-evident truths in the face. One such truth is that the horrors of the Dirty War were no secret either to the Callaghan or Thatcher governments, or to many others in the allied world; and that if the allied powers had rallied behind the Carter ...”

“... had already published his translation of the Journals – and who ‘did perhaps accept a touch of self-identification in concentrating on this peculiar and tormented figure’. He is lightly sketched in the character Pennistone in The Military Philosophers, leaving out ‘immensities’ which include an existentialist distaste for abstract thought and a love ...”

“... much of Jane Austen’s technique through her corrections of the niece’s: this character is not self-consistent, the early history of another should be hinted earlier in the book, Honourables are not introduced as such in the drawing-room, an elegant baronet wouldn’t say ‘Bless my Heart.’ But it was her niece Fanny Knight who showed the highest ...”

“... can be said to have been achieved at a heavy cost not only in human lives but also in national self-esteem. But the Vietnam War, while it overshadowed American politics and diplomacy during those four years, by no means limited the vast field through which Dr Kissinger, as Presidential Assistant for National Security, had to range. There was the continuous ...”