“... darkness of this Russian universe, there are other intelligent beings: ‘dozens of stubborn, self-contained individuals like me – each of us writing, with honour and conscience as his guides, all that he knew about our age ...’ The other belief is that their work will only appear long after they are all dead, hidden by friends and descendants in ...”

“... wasteful duplication of new titles in such areas as cookery, gardening, health, beauty, yoga, self-help. There is a huge choice for the consumer, but at what a price to the trade. During the 1974 recession it was expected that much waste and over-production in publishing would be flushed out by financial exigencies, and that a trimmer and more soundly ...”

“... to be reversed. It is a love letter by an aging and ailing man in a world which valued dignity and self-control. Clearly, if things had gone better, the new house in St David Street would have had a mistress. The added material in the book does not really justify the title of a new edition, since it could well have been put across within a learned article, and ...”

“... moving – especially, here, the love poems, or rather the poems of separation, and the occasional self-contained play of imagination, like ‘Truce’, a recreation of the Christmas fraternisation between British and German troops in 1914. Thomas Kinsella is the kind of poet you either can or can’t take. He is very strong meat. After an auspicious ...”

“... for a Confessor, having suffered, and long by the Bigotts of both Parties’. In our sceptical and self-consciously tolerant age, Erasmus seems at times to be coming into his own. Until quite recently, the modern revival of Erasmus and his legacy has rested chiefly on the great critical edition of his correspondence by Percy Stafford Allen, who from 1924 to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Tudor Street Weekly. Occasionally, I get the disloyal suspicion that there is something rather self-indulgent, a trifle embarrassing, possibly even juvenile rather than Juvenal, about either pushing, or mainlining, 52 shots of undiluted humour a year. Almost nobody can resist dipping into a open box of chocolates, if it is left hanging about within ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... women regain their strength as individuals’. Its services were run for women by women: self-defence classes, court chaperoning and support groups.Callers of any gender can use the RCEW helpline, but the workers are all women and many of the original feminist principles guide its practice. Accepting a caller’s account of their abuse stands as a ...”

“... wearers do – a glimpse, perhaps, of the Strachey that Carrington saw. She was also a frequent self-portraitist. The most striking of the examples at Pallant House is a watercolour from 1913 in which she stands side-on, one arm braced against a door frame as she strides forwards in baggy blue trousers, red-heeled shoes and a striped shirt. Her corps cap is ...”