“... of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in all British colonies. His plan got little local support. Few Chinese businessmen saw any need to share even municipal government with rickshaw-pullers. Hong Kong’s British (mostly Scottish) tycoons have never lost their ...”

“... easily findable on YouTube. ‘What we want to look at is the hard edge of a tough, fashionable, self-conscious group, now at the top of the New York avant-garde art world,’ Melvyn Bragg explains, blunt brown sideburns toning nicely with his blunt brown tie. A bit later he addresses Acker directly. ‘You talk in your books about doing away with ...”

“... mental not physical damage. Only many years of psychoanalysis, he believed, had saved him from self-destruction through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s ...”

“... found no dinner prepared? Besides, she had meant to phone the weekly order at the grocer’s, the Self Help, and it might be too late for the order-boy to deliver it … Our picnic was too soon over.Lottie died not long afterwards. Her self-effacement seems to have served as a caution to her daughter.Frame and Sargeson read ...”

“... a class by themselves in the history of artificial life: the first solo free-walking self-propelled androids’. The other figures offer variations on the monk’s theme. One is a lay brother worrying a tiny beaded rosary; another a bearded saint crowned by a halo, with a six-note glockenspiel in its rump including miniature bells and ...”

“... all good Protestants against the malign influence of Enoch Powell. Powell was a great help to the self-effacing and well-nigh inarticulate leader of the Official Unionists, James Molyneaux, until South Down was lost to the Unionists in 1987. He was a personal advertisement for the complete integration of the Province with Britain for which he stood. He ...”

“... from alienation. Trapped in conflicts which are not of his making, the middleman arrives at a dour self-knowledge which is the keynote of the book. Mukherjee’s dislocated exiles learn tenacity with their disillusionment. Nevertheless, they are as likely to show compassion as anger or brutality. The emigrant Indian woman studying in New York in ‘A Wife’s ...”

“... many other big bananas, Tinguely threw a switch and set the heap on course to clanging, twanging self-destruction. All three networks solemnly recorded the event, which for many people inaugurated the period of ‘non-judgmental’ art criticism. Marcel Duchamp, Warhol’s original Pop guru, commented approvingly that there was merit in the movement to ...”

“... of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures. In The folks that live on the hill the hero-as-shit has given way to the hero-as-patriarch. Harry Caldecote, a retired librarian, heads an extended family of the weak, the lost and the habitually drunk ...”

“... fashionable world. Following the portraits in sequence, one watches him gathering skills. A stiff self-portrait about the age of twenty shows him in a Cavalier lace collar and a cloak lined with red. Anne Bateman, painted a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of ...”

“... to culture if literary academics turn into New Historicists – to such lengths has the process of self-disablement as an intellectual enterprise been carried by literary studies in the last two decades. The article which Professor Laqueur wrote before he succumbed was about the working-class demand for elementary education in England around 1800. He argued ...”

“... the reader by her normality, to a greater extent even than do accounts of the American poet. Self-groomed like her hairstyle and worn like a twinset, her intensity seems healthy and normal, as it seemed to her sensible and amiable lawyer father, or to a family friend, the rising young diplomat Charles Ritchie, who was to meet Elizabeth Bowen in London in ...”

“... of the Levellers. That is no longer so. The Seventies saw a revival of the movement for Scottish self-government. There can be no Scottish devolution without an element of a written constitution, bringing with it the power of the courts – or of a specially constituted court – to interpret the terms of whatever Scotland Act is in force. It is highly ...”

“... approach makes her dreadfully anxious, and that Jack is merciless towards feminine weakness and self-denial. Harriet is a moderately literary person who responds to the gloomier aspects of Jane Eyre and Little Dorrit, and who, as she sets out alone for Jack’s apartment, realises that it is April, ‘traditionally the cruellest month’. Beautiful people ...”

“... me serve time for inciting rhyme to riot ... I ent serving no jail sentence I slashing suffix in self-defence I bashing future wit present tense and if necessary I make de Queen’s English accessory / to my offence. Unlike the poets, the members of the new generation of Caribbean novelists have not so far made strenuous attempts to structure their works ...”