“... 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 ...”

“... rates. Yet homeopathy very soon felt itself pinched between practice and orthodox inflation. Once self-styled scientific medicine came to run the health cartel the most percipient attacks on its authority have seldom come from those with shares in the monopoly. Doctors have been understandably quiet about their interests. Even their most strongly argued cases ...”

“... must reconcile ourselves to the fact that electronic man does not in all ways share our view of self and world. The majority of readers of the LRB will no doubt sigh regretfully in sympathy, but if I read Bolter correctly, it is not only the humanist who is thus challenged. ‘The issue is not whether the computer can be made to think like a human, but ...”

“... that Scott was a liar, fraud, sponger and crook and dismissed Andrew Newton as a perjurer and a self-advertising ‘chump’. This wasn’t the whole content of his very long summing-up, and at one time, as Waugh shows, he seemed to be suggesting to the jury that there had been a conspiracy to kill and not (as the defence suggested) to frighten. But the ...”

“... proudly to their grannies, ex-husbands, and the like. These sensitives were now exposed as shoddy self-deluders. Auden understood about the real, the hidden and depressed, readership for poetry: these poets of 1969 were even more hidden, more depressed and very likely ate in even nastier cafeterias than the types Auden had in mind. They had probably never ...”

“... of January 1906. In Volume Two of the diary Beatrice had already escaped from the neurotic self-analysis and sense of guilt which had characterised the first instalment; now in Volume Three we are aware of a confident, outgoing, independent-minded and very sociable woman approaching her fifties. In these entries, even before the defeat of the Balfour ...”

“... attractive. Pursuing ‘the jingling art’ for ‘amusement’, and in order to keep madness and self-destruction at bay, came readily to this Buckinghamshire Sheherazade. Lisping in numbers since his schooldays, he could now repay his friends’ kindness – their nursing, gifts of money, oysters and port – by making them verse-offerings and penning ...”

“... Shakespeare 20th-century ‘relevance’. Next man up is Stanley Fish, author of Surprised by Sin, Self-Consuming Artefacts and Is there a text in this class? Fish is a resilient veteran of many tumbles in such tourneys, and he seems to thrive on them, but because he is engaged on a scholarly patch that Dame Helen has made peculiarly her own (the prose of ...”

“... letter to the Times focused on the way this artful rogue weaved potted criminology into his self-exoneration. In the Sutcliffe case, the public, widely welcomed a verdict of criminal responsibility and appeared to get some amusement from the judicial humiliation of the psychiatrists who sought to portray him as the hapless victim of his own ...”

“... work, Towards the Great Civilisation, Radji could spot the Chalfont-Kim Il Sung shoot-self-in-foot syndrome and hastened to Ashraf’s side. He produces some pretty strong arguments against doing the book, but not enough to deter Ashraf – or the Lords Chalfont and Weidenfeld, who turn up later at Princes Gate keen as mustard. Radji has sprinkled ...”

“... impression is not of a man driven to testify but of a practised, cunning and profoundly self-conscious artist. The stories are always readable but this is often achieved by mere literary skill and one feels cheated rather than enriched at the end. There are several reasons for this disparity. One is the influence of Hemingway and Lardner. The faux ...”

“... on the surface, perhaps, but profoundly significant when viewed from the standpoints of male self-identity and of national self-image. There is no doubt that the hair-cutting order drove many communities that might have surrendered peacefully into open and usually fatal resistance to the newly appointed magistrates of ...”

“... evolution that lasted half a century, railway stations became, both in grandiloquent and in self-effacing modes, the characteristic public buildings of the age, expressing that mélange of optimism, fancy and thoroughness so dissimilar from our own climate of feeling. What better venue than the Gare d’Orsay for the museum of the 19th century which has ...”

“... if they think the money can be better spent on other forms of advertising – in short, wholly self-interested. No sponsor backs adventurousness, with the risk of failure: a good Arts Council is one that is willing to do exactly that. However, Rees-Mogg, who insists that he is not political, believes that subsidy ‘weakens the sinews of ...”