“... for his heterogeneous essays of the 1950s, assembled as The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self. The ‘Honest Men’ were generalists, men of letters and purveyors of opinion in a tradition which emerged early in the 19th century with Jeffrey, Hazlitt, Macaulay, Carlyle and J.S. Mill, and in the 20th century included Orwell. Their idea-mongering ...”

“... now appear at the helm of a series that proposes to span the centuries, Medieval to Modern. The self-questioning that must have gone on before he led, or figureheaded, a number of volumes offering ‘Literature in History’ is indicated in his three-page General Editor’s Preface, where he hints, but does not spell out for the uninitiated, that it is too ...”

“... radicalism of the agents who flourished in the spring and summer of 1647 than to the intruded, self-righteous and mutinous idealism of the Levellers. The agents ‘always spoke out of their own experiences as soldiers, and mainly about the grievances of soldiers’. Yet by the autumn ‘unstable’, ‘excitable’, ‘violent’ men were to be found ...”

“... called Skink Tyree, a Vietnam vet liberal, who chooses to live on road kills, a swamp rat whose self-presentation is somewhere between Kris Kristofferson (in one of Peckinpah’s more unbuttoned ventures) and Gary Snyder. Neat prose to surf in short sharp bursts, each cross-cut segment with a hook in its tail. Impotent fantasies aimed against the ravages of ...”

“... combines a Nietzschean dissection of marital power relations with the sunny optimism of a self-help manual is very American and a little strange, but that women get less out of marriage because they need it more is an important insight. Does it follow that if women need marriage less they’ll get more out of it? Since ...”

“... but intensitive parental ‘ejections’ of Jane from childhood on to explain the withdrawn, self-protective manner of the adult woman. They were ‘frightening and unpleasant experiences over which she had no control and which required periods of recovery; they helped to form the “whimsical girl”, almost always well defended when it came so showing ...”

“... Since 1990, the economy has shrunk by 30 per cent, shattering the late Kim Il Sung’s dream of self-reliance. His son, Kim Jong Il, holds the reins of power in league with the Armed Forces, and both need the food aid to maintain their positions. The United States, not for the first time, is substituting ‘humanitarian assistance’ for foreign policy. Is ...”

“... Margaret is in the foreground, spotlit, while behind her Glenconner’s life plays out with such self-effacing matter-of-factness that it takes time for the reader to realise that of these two intertwined biographies Glenconner’s is by far the more remarkable. The book is not, as a whole, what the publishers have made it appear – another gossipy ...”

“... a young woman, whom he finds quite attractive, that the local diet of bread and bean paste seems self-mortifying. She reproves his unbridled appetites, then startles him by asking how a wish ‘to grip me tight and push part of your body into me’ comports with admiration for the beautiful and the good.Simón’s ...”

“... echoed around him throughout his life. But despite all that, Pope still looks like the most self-consciously canonical of 18th-century English poets, even though the canon has been exploded outwards, and even though the number of people who really love reading him is now, I would guess, less than a thousandth of what it was in 1720.He achieved this ...”

“... by EC Comics’ crime and horror output. Publishers responded with a Hays Code-style programme of self-censorship. EC closed all its titles except Mad magazine, and American comics became a little blander, until, in his own telling, Stan Lee came along and shook things up.Lee – the writer-editor who supervised the renaissance at Marvel Comics in the early ...”

“... fuel extraction have shifted tactics. Climate denialism in the 1990s was an overt and clearly self-interested lie, a conspiracy against science; the emphasis today is on broad-based movements that aggressively defend the fossil fuel way of life. Even with considerable funding from business, the big lie became hard to uphold; Exxon and BP now acknowledge ...”

“... beyond repression. What these women experience is closer to a wipeout of identity in which all self-knowledge or self-recognition is lost: ‘I did not know who I was any more’; ‘I do not appear to exist’; ‘It is as if you are inside a grave.’ For the migrant woman, as she tries and fails to make sense of an ...”

“... prestige of France. When they finally met, de Estrada unwittingly snubbed Napoleon’s progressive self-image by explaining that Mexico needed ‘a dictatorship on the pattern established in France’. But this didn’t prevent the two men from plotting regime change. French forces were to accompany a British naval operation aimed at punishing Juárez for ...”

“... published in 1981 as Too Late to Turn Back, Paul Theroux describes her as ‘modest and a bit self-mocking’. At one point she recounts her attempts to tell a rural Liberian schoolteacher about her home town: ‘The London I had described of crowds, and hurrying motor vehicles, noise and underground trains, that was terrifying. It all sounded ...”