“... circle, was marvellously translated into aplomb. Unfortunately, Craft appears to dislike the self that mastered awkward situations as much as the self that originally endured them. The personal strand of the book is indeed preoccupied with self-loathing. June 1966 – Craft is ...”

“... a grim smile and a daunting accuracy, she flashes her torch down into those unlit places of the self where we rearm for our intimate wars with one another. She had chosen to occupy once and for all the territory most favourable to her ambitions both as a novelist and as a moralist. In Tropisms she invented her own form of Social Darwinism, by using ...”

“... two-thirds of whom, according to an opinion poll carried out a year ago, now want some form of self-administration. According to the same poll, barely II per cent of Kurds actually want to secede from Turkey. Even the PKK has explicitly abandoned its earlier talk of separation. Yet the state is adamant in viewing any expression of Kurdishness as incipient ...”

“... person in the United Kingdom.’ His resentment was both intensified and balanced by a remarkable self-confidence, and MacDonagh is particularly good at showing how the various elements in this complex psychology were rooted in his Kerry background and shaped by his education in France, London and Dublin. All of this made him at the same time a social ...”

“... what Archer would doubtless call the greatest of all prizes. It says much about Mandelson’s self-confidence that he engaged energetically in the subsequent war – a campaign conducted with off-the-record briefings, the supplanting of Brownite X with Blairite Y in the fifth most senior post at the Department of Trade and Industry and anonymous ...”

“... be having some trouble keeping calm as a couple of leaders of the Revolutionary Organisations – self-styled keepers of a revolutionary conscience which, in this instance, seemed to mean support for the miners against a reactionary government in thrall to the IMF – dragged out their introductory speeches. Cozma himself didn’t speak: he ranted, barely ...”

“... ends) at home – the ripples of sympathy growing weaker and weaker as they move outwards from self to tax-adviser to hamster to wife to fellow Americans and remaining mammals – was, according to Geras, refuted by the motives driving gentiles to rescue Jews from liquidation. Rescuer testimony suggested, contrary to Rorty, that shared humanity was the ...”

“... set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) ‘as a self-portrait in sound, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was an autobiography’. Then there’s the private myth about Byron: ‘I still feel the same liking, the same passion for L.B.,’ Liszt wrote to Countess Marie d’Agoult, his first ...”

“... driven to discover the truth of its own condition: its ‘metaphors of agency, mastery, and self-centredness’ are revealed to be just that – metaphors, illusions, self-deceptions. The impulse to the lyrical, and to the integrity and authority of the self, survives only in the ...”

“... and other maritime folklore which attached to his theme. He certainly indulged from the start in a self-conscious connoisseurship of the whole experience, with a penchant for collecting mementoes. By most standards, however, Dudley told the facts ‘plainly’ and neither his German rescuers nor the people at Falmouth seem to have reacted with special ...”

“... the ministers used about the King. Asquith is supine, silent, complacent, immobile, dilatory and self-indulgent. Churchill is insensitive, tactless, wilful and impossible. Bonar Law is unamiable, curt, dour, abrasive and disrespectful. Lloyd George is nonchalant, graceless and spiteful. Fisher is venomous, Baldwin is slothful, Balfour is irresolute. And the ...”

“... of the kind he describes will now be taking place without him. As a foreigner, Plante claims in self-defence, he is unable to grasp the distinctions the English make between public and private life – which sounds convenient but could, I suppose, be true. No one who records everything he sees his friends do and hears them say does so without malice, yet ...”

“... effort of the central books of Trilling’s career, The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955) and Beyond Culture (1965): the attempt to create a culture, often to conjure one into being simply by asserting that it exists. He has several strategies to this end, and the major one is to deploy his literary and critical authority. Every ...”

“... Catholic shadow falling over so much of his beliefs. Most ironic of all is when Mr Freeman’s self-emasculation from the historical and the Irish dimensions leads him to scold Edmund Burke for failing to understand the Irish Catholic question. As examples go of scholarly wisdom after the fact, it is a fine entry, comparable to the economic historians who ...”

“... and his worldly occupation: the former was to be manifest in the latter. It was through rigorous self-analysis and constant application to duty that the elect ascertained his election, and since to doubt election was to demonstrate that one belonged to the reprobate, such analysis and application were the necessary seals of salvation. Scottish theology, as ...”