“... the fray, as eagerly as if the two countries had only just met. Like ACIS, BAIS can tap ethnic self-awareness: more subterranean and complex than in the Irish-American instance. Not only indifference or hostility within Britain, but the rhetoric that Ireland and Britain are alien, has left a vast interpenetration largely unexamined. Indeed, all the sins of ...”

“... up by some bigger magazine. Whereas in Ezra Pound’s day, the established culture-powers were self-protectively resistant to the new, nowadays they seem almost voraciously hospitable. Even magazines like Harpers and Queen and Cosmopolitan are in the market for highbrow innovation, or intellectual attitude-striking, in a way that would have been hard to ...”

“... he was called, ‘weary of his own fluency. Not really engaged with anything.’ The ennui and self-doubt which afflicted the writer-hero in that book have been well and truly jettisoned in favour of a return to classic lines of storytelling in Sacred Hunger. And a renewed sense of ‘engagement’ is evident in the minutely-detailed recreation of his ...”

“... The findings of the opinion polls were thus almost ideal for the Conservatives in producing a self-falsifying effect – or a self-correcting one, as they might say. Did the polls get it so wrong after all? Or did we get it wrong? Were we misreading a dynamically charged input into the opinion-forming process as a ...”

“... Used to monitoring and catering to the whims of men as the only way to survive, she was rarely self-reflective on paper, so we can only guess what went on in her mind. Sontag presents her as a woman of enthusiastic plasticity, torn from her roots and avidly collecting love and the lifestyles of her lovers as a means of giving herself shape and purpose. The ...”

“... it. The result also suggests that the conventional constraints upon government folly or self-deception no longer operate. Although I think there are certain things that even the present over-respectful electorate finds unacceptable – the Poll Tax is an obvious example – it is clear that the limits upon a Conservative government are now extremely ...”

“... enthusiasm for Wagner’s efforts to regenerate our country. We feast on compassion, heroic self-denial, Christianity, vegetarianism, Aryanism, southern colonies.’ Three years before, in Religion and Art, the composer had suggested that the emancipation of the Jews in 1871 was leading to a dreadful degeneration, and that this might be stopped by ‘a ...”

“... of itself. The Eighties have been one of the most significant decades of Scottish cultural self-definition in the past two centuries.’ And in that decade three major scholarly ventures – the New History of Scotland, People and Society in Scotland, and the Literary History of Scotland, 19 volumes in all – duly took off. These projects were ...”

“... are part of them, the bosses, and should be pulled down’). At once defensive yet assured, such self-scrutiny is a disarming feature of many of Bragg’s novels. Characters are constantly seeing themselves at one remove, and are prone to suffering from weird, out-of-body experiences: ‘the eye of his mind would slither from his head and regard what ...”

“... of this century to be survivors of the Ekaterinburg massacre: a parade of deluded people drunk on self-aggrandisement, shrieking for attention. Massie throws them up into the air like so many clay pigeons, watches the arc of their flight, and shoots them to pieces just as they near the earth. The story of Anna Anderson, the most plausible of the ...”

“... another voyeur? It was difficult not to see the bombing as retribution for the extraordinary self-promotion that brought the Olympics to Atlanta and, to the consternation even of American journalists, dominated the competition. In violation of Olympic protocol, only the US National Anthem was sung to open the games. Only Americans – Dennis Mitchell ...”

“... for a long time, perhaps for ever.’ Not long afterwards, I go to see Alexander Batanov, a smart, self-confident man in his thirties who has turned himself from an academic researcher into a political consultant. He has worked with Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, and helped engineer a public reconciliation between this wily former bureaucrat turned Mayor ...”

“... of the so-called reinvention of welfare now underway in Washington is to try and stop the apparent self-destruction of the inner-city family. But Bourgois discovers something a little different. Women have children on their own in East Harlem because the men – Primo and Caesar and others like them – are abusive, violent, disruptive and immature. In what is ...”

“... Constitution’s language raises such questions but does not provide answers. Nor is the document self-enforcing. Some provisions, like the free speech and equal protection clauses, were violated for decades before being invigorated in the 20th century. Others, like the guarantee of a republican form of government, have been entirely forgotten. During and ...”

“... fertility; others were used to mark senility (when pendulous), otherness (when circumcised) and self-control. They were a symbol as much for women as for men and figured in a number of women-only festivals in the form of phallic costumes and phallic cakes. Some care was taken to distinguish different kinds of penis in art, and a strong contrast seems always ...”