“... authority because of its sheer volume and difficulty. It seems to offer such depth of nuance and self-qualification that efforts to generalise about it are rare. Yet, as Sanders shows, the nuancing is mainly an illusion, and Neusner has presented throughout his work a simple thesis to which he returns after all qualifications, even at the cost of frequent ...”

“... been asked to pursue a single topic across two centuries of social change. Professor Thompson is a self-effacing editor. In a modest preface he is at pains to stress that his contributors do not represent a single school of thought or editorial doctrine. But like the film director who receives an Oscar, and makes a speech giving all the credit to the wonderful ...”

“... even to the utmost that complete devotedness can possibly devise! ... She is utterly regardless of self, and patient under all the misery she suffers, because they are inflicted by him, yet devoted still. Completely wrapped up in him, she meekly endures any and every torture he inflicts! Except that Fowler was a male confirming expected female behaviour, and ...”

“... the cover of Madoc. Oh, and one other thing. The narrative is sectioned-off into short, mostly self-contained poems, each given the name of a philosopher or quasi-philosopher (such as Frederick the Great or Schiller) to whose life or thought the poem makes some reference. To sum up, then, ‘Madoc’ consists of two unequal chronological sequences: the ...”

“... today, especially for so conventional a figure as Major. Only Thatcher’s genuine passion for self-made men, together with the acute shortage of loyal Thatcherites of real ability, would have launched him on the fast track of promotion which took him, in little more than a decade, from first election as an MP via two of the great offices of state, to 10 ...”

“... not give a damn? Perhaps the question is: should we? Maybe it is a sign of maturity and inner self-confidence to be the first nation in Europe not to need a national anthem/flag/dress/history/myth of origins. We meant the Act of Union, even if the Scotch did not (and before anyone writes in to complain about ‘Scotch/Scots’ etc, read the entry under ...”

“... of his hero. Professor Pinney should be asked, as he toils at later volumes, to curb his urge for self-effacement. Kipling was driven by contrasting aptitudes. His journalistic training pushed him one way, the example of his artistic father another; and, for a grandson of Wesleyan ministers, a third pressure – one towards preaching – became at times the ...”

“... The vast cotton fields of Kazakhstan, sucking in enormous amounts of water and spreading a self-defeating salinity, are the result of decisions by Soviet planners whose need for cheap fibre outran their good sense. Neither has had anything to do with pressure of numbers. And for every growing population in which young men agitate, there’s a score in ...”

“... we know about her suggests that she was an exceptionally strong-minded and self-willed woman and William an exceptionally docile husband,’ one is bound to wonder just what it is that we do know. Is this Stone’s own – possibly stereotypical – view of male and female temperaments? Or is his interpretation influenced by the ...”

“... it was Joyce who first fully exploited the interior monologue, a device which reveals the inner self even of characters whose self is concealed. In sum, a bruised collective memory has driven generations of Irish people to fictions of one sort or another and, since the population at large is affected, the imaginative ...”

“... a writer ... do something useful ... Go back and be a publisher.’ The advice was brutal, and self-serving in effect, but it was right; and Pound backed it up by offering the names of writers Laughlin could help. New Directions (or ‘Nude Erections’ as Pound preferred to call it) was born. By 1936, when its first anthology was published, the names of ...”

“... 55 hours a week over a 48-week year strains credulity), but the greater part of that work is self-imposed – and not universally. In the past universities have gone easy on the drones who hived with them, regarding their delinquency as the price to be paid for the autonomy of the self-disciplined many. No novel, play ...”

“... the Catholicism of the One, True, Universal Church so much as the tribal ritual of a people whose self-belief depends less on religion than on history. The contrast with Britain could hardly be greater. Britain is the only area of northern European Protestantism Tóibín ventures into. History has produced here a pathology in which disputes about the nature ...”

“... and certainly his less agreeable traits such as selfishness and want of consideration and of self-discipline grew more pronounced. Bringing Consuelo over made no apparent difference: he still telephoned his friends and acquaintances at all hours to read them great passages of his most recent work, and he was capable of getting Consuelo out of bed twice ...”

“... has always been a classic Modernist, committed to an exemplary Modernist programme of narrative self-doubting, tricksy uncertainty-mongering, caginess, the unsettling of readers – what Finnegans Wake knows as HeCitEncy, hesitation about citing. And Ghosts keeps up the old Modernist ways. ‘Here they are. There are seven of them. Or better say, hall a ...”