“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”