“... 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 ...”

“... first wife as for her novels and short stories. It is testimony to Capote’s uncanny knack for self-promotion that at the time of the Life feature, he had produced only a handful of short stories: his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, would not appear for another six months. And whereas Stafford, who wrote very little fiction during the last twenty ...”

“... to make the point that the son of the insurance salesman from Newark has done rather well for him self. May was/is ‘a gentile woman at the other end of the American spectrum from Josie. She had been sent off to the best schools by a Cleveland paint-manufacturing family that had achieved enormous financial success, as well as the civic distinction and social ...”

“... that is, the selected facts to support her assertions. Edwina’s part was to use her talent for self-publicity to grind her health education message into the nation’s skull. It had to be kept simple. To avoid cervical cancer, for instance: ‘Don’t smoke and don’t screw around.’ Her book’s tone is jarring and bright; there are faded incursions ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a loss. He was gripped by two warring impulses: emulation and escape. Free to become himself, what self should he become? There was still a chance, he at first seems to have thought, that he might turn out to be a novelist with gifts of his own. He published five novels, and then stopped. It was not that the books were rubbish; indeed Bron is at pains to let ...”