“... 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 ...”

“... amount of just hanging there.’ The piece ends with a comment on a regrettable ‘vast area of self-experience’, namely the fact that the sky is now so often a war zone: ‘That’s who we are.’ Just before this conclusion, however, the sky offers a reading of ‘a wonderful and forgiving aspect of Hindu thought’ that helps us to see why the idea of ...”

“... A Journey, published in 2010, was long, discursive, eccentric, a bit mystical, but also matey, self-confident, sometimes blunt, occasionally cheesy. It read like he’d written every word of it. The style of his new book, On Leadership (Hutchinson Heinemann, £25), has changed somewhat, as befits someone who now spends his time offering executive advice to ...”

“... exasperating in itself. Dunthorne realises it isn’t a work of record but a chunk of tendentious self-representation. The dead are no less cunning than the living. ‘If the narrator of the memoir was the ideal part of himself,’ Dunthorne asks, ‘then where had Siegfried hidden the rest?’Unforthcoming about the important stuff, Siegfried is elsewhere ...”

“... for something like George Brown’s 1964-65 National Plan was challenged by the powerful and self-confident Industries Group, which confined itself to specific questions of market research, rationalisation or industrial relations, like a modern NEDC sector working party. Max Nicholson, who covers this period, seems now to believe that the chance of ...”

“... and often come close to deserving the Athenaeum’s strictures. Exaggeration and egregious self-praise are, alas, also still with us in the genre. The dustjacket of the Shell Guide claims that ‘none of the great many books’ on the city ‘delves as deeply into London’s historical and social background’. The genre suffers from another ...”

“... travellers come home with and are charged with making up – the traveller in question being a self-effacing romantic singleton who would not be out of place in a short story by Denton Welch. Now we have the wonders of the near-at-hand, located in and around the Black Mountains of Radnor. Mr Chatwin’s strange new place accommodates the lore of twinship ...”

“... to solve it: the bourgeoisie applauds the ‘subversive’ artist as a licensed anti-self. Kings used to applaud their fools in much the same way. But Professor Brooke-Rose has no stomach for such grand or grandiose theories. Sounding more and more like Dame Helen, she proposes to get on with the job of analysing a specific text. She ...”

“... that their inheritance from the Empire-builders was ‘an ease around the world, and an infinite self-confidence. Following their knightly imaginations, wandering across the face of the earth, they had no axe to grind. Theirs was, briefly, an age of chivalry, soon to be laid at rest in the trenches ...’ We are talking here about toffs, as they keep their ...”