“... its modern expression in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Galicia and the Pays Basque’. The self-evident rottenness of the timber that stokes the fire is beside the point: what matters is the fire, the heat of it and the light it throws. (Which is not to deny that in the case of poets better than either MacDiarmid or Graves we respect the soundness of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unconquerable air of slightly arrogant courtesy and extreme intelligence. I suspect this apparent self-possession was often hard-won. His lot was a lonely one. His power of abstract concentration was legendary, but in the right company he could be gregarious and convivial. His life in China did not give all that much of a chance. I was often acutely aware ...”

“... our slippery language is honourable: but when it leads him to such impractical stringencies, it is self-defeating. Moreover, what we call ‘stringencies’ may as well be called, if we shift the focus only a little, ‘self-indulgences’. In some of the earlier and less strenuous essays here, he shows he can recognise with ...”

“... For what did Bunting earn in royalties through the first 65 years of his life? And how can such a self-denying or self-defeating career be accounted for, in a survey that concentrates on how a poet finds, or woos, or fabricates a readership? Presumably Bunting’s royalty statements look more rosy since Briggflatts. (And ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... harrowing record could not have been done except in verse (its clipped cadences shutting out any self-pity, any rhetorical elaboration). As a pitilessly unsensational chronicle of what a working-class childhood could be in the England of the 1920s, it is irreplaceable. But is it in any real sense poetry? And from where I stand I have to judge that it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... within universities who speak of English literature – from another she is importantly and not self-importantly a citizen of the world. The term naturally has its good-natured comedy, and she describes it – when conferred by Goldsmith on his visiting Chinaman, a penetrating watcher of 18th-century English civilisation – as ‘a phrase both levelling ...”

“... to social discourse, in all spheres of moral life. Such an account of the latitude for self-determination within the grip of the social and the discursive is of some practical moment for current controversy over sexual ethics, simply because history puts paid to the idea that an ethics of sexual behaviour can ever be grounded in empirical claims as ...”

“... view that the Malvinas Islands were an extension of the South American Continental Shelf, and self-evidently belonged to the South American state four hundred miles away, rather than to some European state eight thousand miles away. Subsequently, as a Member of the indirectly-elected European Parliament, I attended two sessions of European-Latin American ...”

“... 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 ...”