“... like that? In his travel book, The European Tribe, Phillips records that his sense of identity and self-esteem was woken when Emile Leroi Wilson, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, shouted at him: ‘Hey you, motherfucker. You don’t talk to black people or what? This place fuck up your head already.’ The main theme of Cambridge was that of the black better ...”

“... man I’ve loved and remained married to?’ For Bernard, told all this by Jeremy, it is so much self-justifying delusion: She left the Party years before me, but she never cracked, she never sorted the fantasy from the reality. Politico or priestess, it didn’t matter, in essence she was a hardliner ... You were either with her, doing what she was ...”

“... then been given the special status of literary consultant. While the other teachers taught mime, self-healing, massage, Tai-Chi and wind-surfing in groups, beginning at 7 a.m., Susan saw aspiring writers one at a time in the café on the beach, where she sat in a stately way sipping Greek coffee. She seemed to have thought deeply about writing, how it ...”

“... themselves off as boys, did another set of dangers assail them in armies not known for their self-control and delicacy? There are psychological questions as well. In ballads and folk tales the cross-dresser is frequently depicted as following a male lover. But factual accounts suggest that this is not often the case. Women might cross-dress to avoid ...”

“... had been overdue. Returning to duty in 1976, Perkins found his old arguments for Aboriginal self-sufficiency consistent with the thinking of his new Liberal minister. The Aboriginal Development Commission, created in 1980, with Perkins as its first chair, was to invest a capital fund so as to create an independent revenue, meanwhile spending a general ...”

“... marks a rather drastic switch from the romantic to the classical, crediting Galen with a fussy, self-important manner and a weakness for dry Latin mottoes – Lux veritatis is the title of the final chapter, in which Cassius informs Galen that he intends to suppress most of what he has heard. We certainly do not warm to any of Prantera’s main characters ...”

“... invasion, to tame and cultivate their continent for fruitful use, and to evolve systems of self-government in which, however labelled, the accountability which gives legitimacy to rulers was a decisive component. Their societies functioned by principles of democratic accountability: wherever these failed, so did the systems in place. These principles ...”

“... incoherent. But American departments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess. Conversely, the conservative vision of society has never been very hospitable to liberal ideals of free speech, open competition, impartial ...”

“... a man committed to ‘a blurting boorishness and lack of refinement’, as well as ‘a self-abasing admiration for rigid order’. Like Hugh MacDiarmid, Paulin said, Hopkins had a ‘risky, over-the-top extremism’ to his imagination, and while in Ireland in 1887-8 gave vent in his verse to ‘revolutionary intoxication, an expressionist whap of ...”

“... we are told, a real possibility. Consider, for example, Eric Drexler’s tiny single-cell-scale self-replicating machines, the ultimate end of ‘nanotechnology’. These would be ideal for sorting through frost-bitten cells, molecule by molecule, putting them back into working order, and, maybe, adding new ones to make a new body (age of your choice) as ...”

“... would win. Her prizelessness needn’t be taken, as some obituarists have seemed to take it, as a self-evident proof of her work’s value – though it shows yet again that the best books often go ungarlanded. Angela’s ten works of fiction had something brilliant on every page, something which couldn’t have been produced by anyone else. But they aren’t ...”

“... in my mind as the most valuable part of the book.This may to some extent be because verse is more self-sufficient, self-contained, and can be cut, as so often it has to be cut for an anthology of this kind, without mortal danger. The extract from Eliot’s The Dry Salvages, for instance, stands quite well by ...”

“... strong Stephen Hero sense, in which the writer is projecting an aggrandised version of his own self and attempting through it to get at society, history, identity, the spirit of the age, all the big themes of the modern novel. Roughly speaking, there are two different sorts of story being told in High Cotton. The first deals with the narrator’s ...”

“... than perfunctorily grateful for. As flu submerges Mrs Marsh she makes a last attempt to assert her self-respect by keeping an appointment with the hairdresser, who has a special regard for her because she once told him, with a touch of old woman’s malice, that he looked as if he were about to go in for the Tour de France. Tony was delighted by that, and now ...”

“... by fear and secrecy ... whose every pleasure has a shadow of guilt and every passion a core of self-hatred’. Without the guilt and self-hatred there would be no pleasure. As in The God-Fearer, there are several inferred comparisons between Baisz’s republic of Sarmeda and the Soviet Union, the more effective because ...”