“... worldly wisdom, but rather tries to employ modern philosophy against itself, proving it to be self-refuting. To mount his counter-attack Hamann relies on Hume, whose works he had discovered in London and whom he would later translate into German. (Kant eventually read Hume in this translation, thus giving Hamann an indirect role in developing the critical ...”

“... the ‘true Sudan thirst’, which amounted to the ‘perpetual liquefaction and evaporation’ of self. This could be tackled only with an evening regime of comprehensive rehydration beginning with tea and ending with ‘that triumphant blend of all whetting flavours, an Abu Hamed – gin, vermouth, Angostura, lime-juice, soda’. Once Anglo-Saxon drinkers ...”

“... against the colonial government which soon fused with broader movements for land reform and self-rule. Even the British expressed a modicum of guilt about their transformation of the Punjab. A Canal Colonies Report of 1933 lamented the replacement of the ‘goat herd’s pipe and the quavering love-song of the camel men’ with ‘the klaxon of the ...”

“... our way into Jordan. The check-list of forbidden photo-opportunities was well-known, and judicious self-censorship kept trouble at bay. It was much more frustrating when I wanted to film at a location I knew was uncontentious and, for reasons of pigheadedness, idleness or lunch-break, the men from the Ministry of Information refused to allow me out of the ...”

“... had bought and prepared the ingredients. Still the pride was something – probably a good deal. Self-respect in one’s activities is shown to be what matters. One of the female interviewees used to like the jobs she’d always had, jobs ‘where you can keep your brains for your hobbies’, cleaning schools and lavatories or checking telephone ...”

“... but they are awkward fictional devices, Keith’s napalm sauce is in every way a bad joke, Sam’s self-questioning about whether the Crisis will reach the Conclusion an irritant driving one to almost Keithian reactions. The book’s ending, in which not Keith but Sam proves to be the murderer, parodies the conventions of the detective story effectively (they ...”

“... training for 28 years as a journalist in the lobbies of the Palace of Westminster. These self-indulgent memories came to mind some weeks ago when most of the newspapers were full of the libel action between Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times and Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph. It came to be widely accepted that this trial represented a ...”

“... Less meat and dairy produce was being consumed per capita. The new diet, however, was not self-evidently less healthy and it certainly enabled a larger population to be supported. Ian Whyte, drawing on the researches of Houston and Cage as well as his own, demonstrates how apprenticeship, kirk sessions records and marriage registers can all be used to ...”

“... Milton Appel who has accused him of being a ‘Jewish shit ... carrying the hereditary curse of self-hate’, and says Zuckerman’s success was the product of ‘a vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy’. ‘Carnovsky’ may be identified as Portnoy’s Complaint and other names given to Lonoff and Appel, but the point is that the ...”

“... inspired by them. Of the two, Spence’s book is more ideographic and narrative, Gray’s the more self-consciously explanatory. Spence is telling a story, relying on a time-honoured alternation between pointillistic details and broad strokes, with no inclination to canvass multiple explanations of events he is relating. Reading Gray, one feels part of a ...”

“... we will not be hearing much about ‘merely good chaps, or fairly good chaps’, nor about ‘self-restrained’ chaps, or ‘secretive’ chaps. And fair enough, we have to say: these are his memoirs, after all. But what then is left to tell? Luckily, Amis possesses a good memory for anecdotes, or so he says, and he is also not too choosy when it comes ...”

“... Letters are brought to completion. Twenty-two more years of Jane Carlyle’s long, witty, sharp, self-dramatising yet oddly attractive litanies about the obstinacy of servants, her husband’s indifference to her, and the annoyances of her lot as a ‘Lion’s wife’ obliged to ‘do the bores’ who come to view the lion himself. And 36 years still to come ...”

“... But what a strange complaint to make when one has come back from London to, of all places, Paris. Self-importance is an occupational hazard in writers – which is one of the reasons one would prefer any amount of Nancy Mitford’s so-called Roedean hoydenishness to the self-importance of some of her middle-class ...”

“... a much wider pattern of fourth and fifth-century Christian culture which based itself openly and self-consciously on traditional pagan models. Educated bishops delighted in their non-Christian learning; letters, sermons, witty table talk and even doctrinal tracts were all regarded as suitable vehicles for virtuoso displays of erudition. In over one hundred ...”

“... than other Muldoon volumes. His previous long poems in particular tend to be sealed off within the self-reflexive confines of their own ludic patterning, a maze of mirrors one enters arbitrarily and inexplicably: the action of ‘Immram’ (Why Brownlee Left, 1980), for instance, is initiated by ‘a sixteen-ounce billiard cue’ with which the narrator is ...”