“... their brutal calamities and our own world. The concept has become an accessory to complacency and self-satisfaction. Anderson asserts that just as charisma cannot be counterposed to traditional bases of authority, neither can it be divorced from the rational-legal order. If Hitler was the ultimate charismatic figure, he was equally a product of just those ...”

“... raised with the same nonchalance he had used in setting up a bookie joint or slipping a tail.’ Self-interest is his motive for leaving as for joining the Mob. The difficulty of our taking Henry as a hero in the approved pattern makes for a queasy unfamiliarity in the film’s stance, and reaction to GoodFellas has betrayed confusion and resentment on this ...”

“... had warned the Germans after 1871, a great victory is a great danger. It suspends the faculty of self-criticism. It tempts the beneficiary to ignore the re-appraisals that the less fortunate have embarked on. For most Britons the war taught two lessons: that a nation secure in its identity and cohesion, confident in its history and its mission, can triumph ...”

“... against all immediate evidence that history would eventually transmute defeat into victory? As self-deception – perhaps the necessary self-deception of a commander refusing to be daunted by short-term setbacks? Unlike Haig, Allenby did not damn himself by keeping a diary nor did he attempt to vindicate himself by ...”

“... SF fandom: for example, IMHO, meaning ‘in my humble opinion’, and ha ha only serious, which is self-explanatory. True hacker jargon must not be confused with the technobabble employed by suits to impress naive real users. It tends to have the surreal nature: ‘the Moof or dogcow is a semilegendary creature that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh ...”

“... stuff, though it went down well at the time, but it shows the eye for strong effects and rather self-consciously powerful situations which Hughes was to construct in his last unfinished trilogy, and in ideas for the films and plays which he kept attempting to write throughout his career. What constitutes a Jamesian clou, even in that crudely dramatic ...”

“... set in London, the alien city to which many Scots were driven by joblessness in the Twenties. The self-consciously brittle tone recalls Lewis’s Apes of God, early Huxley, and Eliot’s young man carbuncular. There are daring-for-the-time references to casual sexual intercourse, Stopesian contraceptive devices, cheap silken undergarments, pick-ups in Lyons ...”

“... personage and Oscar Wilde has been too much of a provocation for all but the most self-disciplined imagination. But the distance between the two is by no means easy to bridge. Oscar himself was notoriously less than obliging in terms of statements of gay identity, let alone gay pride, although he had more than a casual acquaintance with the ...”

“... that relating to its own dignity, a cause long recognised as lost by all except those whose self-esteem is ballooned by belief in it. In this regard, as in most matters, the Liberal Democratic reaction is the most comic, and the most revealing. Two of the Party’s senior spokesmen offered totally contradictory judgments on the conduct of the editor of ...”

“... version of history has played a major role in defining the American nation. What they call the ‘self-congratulatory national history’ of the 19th century helped to recast the experience of a few million people on the fringe of European civilisation into a drama with meaning for the entire world. The United States was in fact a multicultural nation from ...”

“... in some of them; we can never really be sure what went on inside Max Gate. Hardy was notoriously self-protective, destroying Emma’s diaries, ghosting his own biography, keeping his heart out of his letters. Seymour-Smith’s insistence on Hardy’s intellectual capabilities, while it overstates the contrary view, is also a step in the right direction. But ...”

“... another by letter. At Christmas, after a debasing night with a senator, Vera, in a drunken act of self-abasement, sends them each a card: ‘I’m no fucking good. Make me an offer.’ The horrified siblings at once join forces to wrest the property away from her. Her brother Tom writes her an officious letter, declaring that the hotel will be sold by auction ...”

“... nor white could easily acknowledge. For people like the Taylers, the retention of any sense of self depended on keeping in place the markers of white middle-class living. One can feel the heat from Maude’s fury, simmering on the page. She was not intended for this. All this was to have been temporary ... The pain of expectation unfulfilled is a major ...”

“... the Square Mile, and its determined protection of its privileges, helped create a climate where self-interested commerce could do virtually what it liked to boost its profits. The speculators and get-rich-quick merchants date from long before Peter Rachman’s Sixties and the Yuppie Eighties. In the history of London, Porter suggests, greed had carte ...”

“... a second language has mattered so greatly to us. When I look a long way back, to disinter my child-self first becoming attached to French at the age of nine or ten, I fancy I find it becoming newly detached at the same time from English, as if first meeting up with a foreign language meant also coming to a more fastidious view of language as such: a great ...”