“... to majority rule on specific policy issues. The framers of the American Constitution were self-conscious in their design of checks and balances, many of which stand as impediments to majority rule. The separation of Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, the territorial design of the election system, the bicameral character of the ...”

“... puts on external behaviour. Genuine as an individual’s motives and interests may be, his outward self may grow into something far apart from his other or ‘own’ self, playing a part that he has to make an increasing effort to live up to. While strength and faith hold out it keeps him going, but at the peril of an ...”

“... ha ha – for he was certainly an opera buff, even if his expertise may in part have rested on a self-confessed preference for ‘fleshy women’ over skinny ballet dancers. When the 24-year-old Callas appeared on the Verona scene in 1947, his friends described her as ‘a sack of potatoes’. Meneghini was then a dashing bachelor of 52 who had made a lot of ...”

“... iceberg than the ship’ – and casually lists the lovely features of her shores as if they were self-evident: ‘On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.’ She can sneak in as much strangeness as any Martian, making the unearthliness of her creatures more apparent by approaching them with domestic similes: man-of-war birds ‘open their ...”

“... have felt some difficulty in settling down to life as an official. He did not lack enterprise or self-confidence – far from it – but no doubt the former businessman was used to going his own way with less interference. Far different were these helots he had now to work with! ‘Your typical civil servant is a terrifying product, almost, even so early as ...”

“... whose whole lives have been spent in the Labour Party can both leave that party and continue with self-respect in politics; and it is not the Liberal Party (in other words, it does not have the image of the eternal loser). The SDP has, above all, added to the Liberals the vital element of credibility, so that people will now actually vote the way they used to ...”

“... satisfaction. He is shrewdly alert to his own and others’ weaknesses, and exempt from vanity and self-pity. He doesn’t imagine that he or they have much to give, that promises are worth making or grieving over when broken. Death has been memorably frequent in his life, and birth rare. One of the few gifts he remembers making is associated with the birth of ...”

“... do-gooder who reveals himself as a hypocrite, and even takes credit for the frankness of his self-denigration. ‘Clamence’ explicitly denotes clamans – the false John the Baptist crying in the wilderness: it also, I believe, has overtones of clemency, though in this partial self-portrait Camus in no way spares ...”

“... who falls in love with her. They move into a flat in Earl’s Court, and, through indifference or self-destructiveness, she serves him a meal containing pork. Without the very careful setting – that wasteland between the A4 and the A30 – the story would lose much of its impact. The most terrible image is not one of physical violation, but of the evidence ...”

“... wondered who would be there Worthy of being his true self to. A girl there           babys her eyes and sends her gaze Widening to wander through The sipping archipelagoes Of frantic islands. Graham’s eclectic techniques and sense of continuity in a national tradition help him to sound timeless when ...”

“... as many of the subjects it covers are of immediate relevance and are suppressed by a kind of self-imposed official secrets act. He omits to describe his journey to Cathay since he doesn’t want the Greeks to know how he got there, which is a disappointment to the novel-reader, though a cunning indication of how historical texts can be limited by ...”

“... down and realises that he has made his name. So many of Carlyle’s difficulties and agonies seem self-created. The condition of the manuscript must be whatever explanation there can be for its destruction. Travel to the north, certainly rigorous when done as cheaply as possible, produced long lists of complaints from both Carlyle and Jane. Was his health as ...”

“... problem is intensified by the large claims which the publishers make on behalf of their series. A self-confessed revision crammer might be undesirable, but it would be relatively harmless – a book in whose company candidates could while away the final weeks before the exam itself. But ‘course companions and study guides’ are in danger of doing much more ...”

“... to become the tools of foreign surveillance?’ There was no doubt a chauvinistic element in this self-image of the free-born Englishman, but the benefit to the political refugees was unquestionable, and their experiences were less contradictory or paradoxical than many of them thought. They enjoyed, or endured, the toleration born of indifference. They had ...”

“... of the Lock (Pope’s), Venus and Adonis (anyone’s), Leviathan (it sounded like Decameron) and Self-Help by Samuel Smiles’. He also devises a literary test for immigrants comprising the opening lines of Piers Plowman. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he observes, ‘how many Indo-Chinese don’t know the average May mornynge temperature of the British Isles ...”