“... it must be admitted, like a card-carrying Fascist, but she did sound like a person of overweening self-confidence and historical naivety. ‘Individual Jews, albeit in quite large numbers, collaborated with Bolshevism. Clearly, the numbers on both sides were great enough for each to think the other primarily responsible for genocide. Since it is the least ...”

“... occupation and place of residence. Among the middle-class, being ‘Irish’ necessarily involves self-conscious effort: they are, after all, trying to hold onto something that increasingly has no sustaining material purpose. For some, the effort may be an attempt to learn Gaelic; for others, it may be membership of a society or study group (anything from the ...”

“... that were collective. If Gyp’s admiration for Bonaparte and Boulanger was a consequence of self-hatred and a quest for masculinity, how do we explain that same admiration on the part of millions of other male and female Bonapartists and Boulangists? In fact it was common for Legitimists to gravitate to Bonapartism. Many upper-class conservatives were ...”

“... J.G. Farrell’s trilogy. Burgess’s later Enderby Trilogy, by contrast, already shows too much self-indulgence, and his fatal tendency to achieve an impression of newness by means of gimmickry. Enderby is a portrait of the artist, with his own brand of self-indulgence concealed as satire. Burgess’s admiration for Joyce ...”

“... to the annual Bergman film, always sufficiently depressing to count as Art. Thus Mason is quaintly self-conscious and defensive about her tastes, pointing out that while historians of children’s literature dismiss the series books as ‘bad habits’, they constitute the primary reading that shaped the desires and fantasies of millions of American ...”

“... altogether fascinating study is not so much Emily Tennyson herself, effortlessly adoring and self-sacrificing wife of the great man, but the undercurrents and cross-currents revealed by the author’s use of minute factualities, and by the many relationships and side-stories she is so good at tracing. Her long books about those highly equivocal figures ...”

“... in Amitai Etzioni’s The Spirit of Community, Ferguson was inoculated threefold. He was, first, a self-conscious Newtonian, concerned to substitute an intense observation of the moral world – whether directly or through such media as classical ethnographies and contemporary travellers’ accounts – for the traditional falsehoods which emanated from the ...”

“... on society, this has obvious limitations: the rhetoric of ‘escapism’, ‘illegality’ and ‘self-harm’ is powerless to explain the rich and diverse culture which has rapidly developed around the drug. At the centre of this culture is music. The evolution of House and Techno, synthetic descendants of Seventies disco and European electronic pop, has ...”

“... Self-respecting guys don’t read Westerns. In fact, unless you look carefully, no one seems to read them. The cowboy novel rates lower even than pornography in the scale of cultural visibility. W.H. Smith (true to their origins: they won a monopoly at railway stations in 1848 in return for an undertaking to purify the nation’s reading matter) recently banished their modest selection of top-shelf skin magazines ...”

“... Strip. In 2010 their number will equal ours.’ Yet the real threat lies, surely, in the issue of self-identity and the degree of comprehension – not sympathy but human awareness – of one’s opponents. When Grossman speaks to a settler from Gush Emunim, he finds it hard to understand her: she talks ‘with pain of the sufferings of Israeli Arabs, on whom ...”

“... of his early meetings with the young Stephen Spender, described Spender as ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person I had ever met’. Something of the sort might be said about Stevie: but one was simultaneously aware of a great deal that was not revealed, and never would be. The public manner (at readings, or at literary-guest-laden meals) and the ...”

“... failure to distinguish between invention and report, made all the more confusing by the author’s self-indulgent taste for digression. One’s attention is abruptly diverted from the life of Pilate to whatever takes her fancy – what medieval dramatists made of it, or what Bulgakov had to say. Since nothing whatever is known of Pilate’s early ...”

“... against the slave trade, and fostered projects for educational and political reform. Capable and self-assured, he combined progressive liberalism with a sharp eye for business. His interest in social betterment evidently did not extend to an involvement with the temperance movement, and he saw no difficulty in making his fortune out of distilling ...”

“... is “freedom” anyway?’). Heinrich understandably viewed his younger brother as self-absorbed, priggish and politically naive. They continued to exchange work, gossip amiably about critics and send each other birthday greetings, but there is no mistaking the resentments that would lead to their wartime estrangement. In a letter written just ...”

“... noticed. Most commercial men, and most gentry, engaged only very intermittently with this arcane, self-referential Parliamentary world; they had more important things to do. Hoppen himself engages even less with popular politics. Chartism’s transitory appeal faded before the walls of capitalism had been breached. Thereafter, radicalism gets short shrift, as ...”