“... Italy, there was a continuous tradition of secular literature in Hebrew, followed by a more self-consciously programmatic secular literary movement that began in Moses Mendelssohn’s Germany and moved east to Poland and Russia, generating journals and literary coteries as well as some original writers. But Harshav, aware of the way languages ...”

“... cheerfully informal, suited the British. Alain Prost’s articulate reasonableness fed a French self-image. Senna was good-looking, ruthless, remote and intense. He was a touch spiritual – he would read his Bible on flights back and forth to Europe and was not averse to attributing his more inspired moments to a force greater than his own – and fiercely ...”

“... invade the older social frameworks of the large household. Conceding too much in an oddly self-abasing conclusion to his expansive account of literary servants, Bruce Robbins declares himself ‘ready to grant that I have not been talking about what is necessarily most complex, sophisticated, profound or even interesting in the English novel’. Do ...”

“... exactly a lost classic, as it is billed, since it was published in 1928, and again, in a slightly self-censored version, in 1968 – says he asked William Burroughs what he thought. ‘It’s the book that made me want to be a writer,’ Burroughs said. But was it poetry? ‘Of course it’s poetry. It rhymes.’ It is ‘closer to “Frankie and ...”

“... Zapata). It was characterised throughout by a quite astonishing degree of duplicity, cynicism, self-seeking, and uninhibited recourse to violence. Indeed, it so often appears to be no more than a protracted slugging-match between rival caudillos that it can be (and has been) questioned whether it should be called a revolution at all. Alan Knight, whose ...”

“... where their circumstances must be ‘less eligible’ than those of the lowest segment of self-supporting labour. Since in material terms the workhouse had to offer a sound roof and what was thought to be an adequate diet – features which many families of self-supporting labourers could not aspire to – it was ...”

“... couple, is comic, but also dangerous: any of the four characters may, at any time, lose all self-possession. As Avram says: ‘It’s incredible. No one has thrown anything.’ In these early stories, the reader, safely out of range of hurled objects, contemplates characters who consider themselves masters of their feelings, but whose lives can be ...”

“... want you to be. For women, not only women of the Third World, this is the most available form of self-preservation. The temporal form of the book is as intricately logical as electric wiring, moving not serially but in bundled threads between the area of darkness of the East and the often artificial light of America. From the electrical storm of ‘high ...”

“... the conventional utilitarian perspective of the age. ‘Utility, Power, Pain, Pleasure, Happiness, Self-interest, are all phrases to which any man may annex any meaning he pleases,’ he wrote in 1835. His identification of the implicit danger of tautology in the utilitarian account of human motivation was shrewd and pithy. ‘To say that when a man acts, he ...”

“... as much a liability as an honour. But then Bishop herself seemed curiously uninterested in self-promotion. Much of her life was spent at what looks like a calculated distance from the literary and academic centres of power, lying doggo. Only towards the end did she return to Boston, where she had spent most of her childhood, to accept a post at nearby ...”

“... world of natural theology with a world which offered much more room for individual initiative and self-improvement – a materialistic world where the rules were set by nature rather than God. Thus during the Reform Bill crisis of 1831-32, the Tory geologist Charles Lyell conflated his uneasiness about the atheistic science to which he had been exposed in ...”

“... clear. The enforcement of Western environmental standards on developing countries expresses the self-indulgent romanticism of late-modern consumer cultures. It is both self-deceiving and inequitable. Developing countries cannot hope to protect their environments by curtailing economic growth. On the contrary, only further ...”

“... the seriousness of the situation.’ Recent experience in Bosnia, though, suggests that in self-defence even artillery fire can be compatible with traditional British notions of minimum force and peace-keeping. General Sir Peter de la Billière, commander of the British forces in the Gulf, is more obviously a Clausewitzian, arguing that ‘once they ...”

“... that it mattered even more to give an appearance of industry and humility. He cultivated humorous, self-deprecating understatement: it was said that he was not asked to write the Declaration of Independence for fear that he would put jokes into it. Disputatious in his youth, Franklin learned from experience to avoid never, always and inevitably and to favour ...”

“... Fan-Mail (1977), for example, owe an obvious debt to Auden’s epistle. So do Charles Osborne’s self-advertising ‘Letter to W.H. Auden’ (‘The fact is that I’m writing a huge book/About you – it’s a kind of ‘Life and Works’ – / In which I aim to take a searching look/At all your poems, books and plays, your quirks’), Francis Spufford’s ...”