“... 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 ...”

“... their brutal calamities and our own world. The concept has become an accessory to complacency and self-satisfaction. Anderson asserts that just as charisma cannot be counterposed to traditional bases of authority, neither can it be divorced from the rational-legal order. If Hitler was the ultimate charismatic figure, he was equally a product of just those ...”

“... somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes’. The Gothic situation is always a self-circularising time-warp from which, however, the reader has broken free, carrying with him, as it were, the now emancipated girl and the radical humanist lifestyle. Terror is cosily isolated, enjoyed because left behind. Politically speaking, there is an ...”

“... Dr Sarkhou is a dapper man. With his smart suit and manicured moustache he looks every bit the self-assured consultant, the established performer on the international conference circuit. But as he talks his emollient manner slips, his frustration at the insensitivity of Kuwait’s rulers grows. ‘It’s taken them a year to set up an official psychiatric ...”

“... the reader by her normality, to a greater extent even than do accounts of the American poet. Self-groomed like her hairstyle and worn like a twinset, her intensity seems healthy and normal, as it seemed to her sensible and amiable lawyer father, or to a family friend, the rising young diplomat Charles Ritchie, who was to meet Elizabeth Bowen in London in ...”

“... of the Levellers. That is no longer so. The Seventies saw a revival of the movement for Scottish self-government. There can be no Scottish devolution without an element of a written constitution, bringing with it the power of the courts – or of a specially constituted court – to interpret the terms of whatever Scotland Act is in force. It is highly ...”