“... of his early meetings with the young Stephen Spender, described Spender as ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person I had ever met’. Something of the sort might be said about Stevie: but one was simultaneously aware of a great deal that was not revealed, and never would be. The public manner (at readings, or at literary-guest-laden meals) and the ...”

“... Strip. In 2010 their number will equal ours.’ Yet the real threat lies, surely, in the issue of self-identity and the degree of comprehension – not sympathy but human awareness – of one’s opponents. When Grossman speaks to a settler from Gush Emunim, he finds it hard to understand her: she talks ‘with pain of the sufferings of Israeli Arabs, on whom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... personage and Oscar Wilde has been too much of a provocation for all but the most self-disciplined imagination. But the distance between the two is by no means easy to bridge. Oscar himself was notoriously less than obliging in terms of statements of gay identity, let alone gay pride, although he had more than a casual acquaintance with the ...”

“... that relating to its own dignity, a cause long recognised as lost by all except those whose self-esteem is ballooned by belief in it. In this regard, as in most matters, the Liberal Democratic reaction is the most comic, and the most revealing. Two of the Party’s senior spokesmen offered totally contradictory judgments on the conduct of the editor of ...”

“... the Square Mile, and its determined protection of its privileges, helped create a climate where self-interested commerce could do virtually what it liked to boost its profits. The speculators and get-rich-quick merchants date from long before Peter Rachman’s Sixties and the Yuppie Eighties. In the history of London, Porter suggests, greed had carte ...”

“... occupation and place of residence. Among the middle-class, being ‘Irish’ necessarily involves self-conscious effort: they are, after all, trying to hold onto something that increasingly has no sustaining material purpose. For some, the effort may be an attempt to learn Gaelic; for others, it may be membership of a society or study group (anything from the ...”

“... version of history has played a major role in defining the American nation. What they call the ‘self-congratulatory national history’ of the 19th century helped to recast the experience of a few million people on the fringe of European civilisation into a drama with meaning for the entire world. The United States was in fact a multicultural nation from ...”

“... as in ‘military drag’, ‘clerical drag’ – where cross-dressing is not involved. A self-consciousness is implied, and with it a consciousness of effect. Clothes are being used to underscore a particular choice of persona, and here the notion of choice is very important. We can choose just who we want to be and reinforce the choice by changing ...”

“... in some of them; we can never really be sure what went on inside Max Gate. Hardy was notoriously self-protective, destroying Emma’s diaries, ghosting his own biography, keeping his heart out of his letters. Seymour-Smith’s insistence on Hardy’s intellectual capabilities, while it overstates the contrary view, is also a step in the right direction. But ...”

“... nor white could easily acknowledge. For people like the Taylers, the retention of any sense of self depended on keeping in place the markers of white middle-class living. One can feel the heat from Maude’s fury, simmering on the page. She was not intended for this. All this was to have been temporary ... The pain of expectation unfulfilled is a major ...”

“... time, personal and external constraints in behaviour became impersonal and internalised, until self-control, in the form of a new ‘economy of instincts’, became automatic – a process akin to the one Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, when a religiously rooted attitude to work gradually became detached from its ...”

“... altogether fascinating study is not so much Emily Tennyson herself, effortlessly adoring and self-sacrificing wife of the great man, but the undercurrents and cross-currents revealed by the author’s use of minute factualities, and by the many relationships and side-stories she is so good at tracing. Her long books about those highly equivocal figures ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Amitai Etzioni’s The Spirit of Community, Ferguson was inoculated threefold. He was, first, a self-conscious Newtonian, concerned to substitute an intense observation of the moral world – whether directly or through such media as classical ethnographies and contemporary travellers’ accounts – for the traditional falsehoods which emanated from the ...”