“... appearance, blessed with an air of extraordinary propriety, but a man of paradox. He was a self-confessed snob who enjoyed moving in what he called ‘the great world’, by which he meant the narrow orbit of country houses and fashionable quasi-literary circles where he believed the best writers were to be met. I never quite found my way there, but ...”

“... ambitions. It says something either for its political naivety or, more probably, for its self-absorption that it did nothing of the sort. In the years after Mrs Thatcher came to power the BBC continued to grow. It added around three thousand staff to its already large payroll. It expanded into further areas of broadcasting. And when the licence fee ...”

“... isolation from Western civilisation, and made his journey appear more of an exploration of his own self.) We may accept that the details of Phat Diem or Santiago were observable by anyone who happened to be there, but venture to think that only one writer would have selected them and not others present in the scene, and described them in those words in that ...”

“... lodge, called Propaganda 2, and as Italian Freemasonry fell into disrepute, so the ripples of self-questioning spread outwards, to other Masonic brotherhoods. In France, there is now open discussion about Masonry’s close ties to the Socialists and speculation as to the part influential Masons played in the 1981 Elections. (The current French Grand ...”

“... but this is almost certainly not the case. It was rather that he seemed to lack any kind of self-doubt or self-criticism. How else could he claim, in his interpretation of the Sistine Ceiling, that Julius II’s ‘favourite theologian’ was a man whom the Pope may never have met, and whose work he may never have ...”

“... Anthony Trollope was a self-confessed workaholic. ‘If my success were equal to my energy,’ he remarked at the age of 55, ‘I should be a great man.’ He was also a compulsive writer. Ten years later, aware of advancing age, he told his son: ‘I finished on Thursday the novel I was writing, and on Friday I began another ...”

“... which in our own lives is so continuously capable of confounding our reasoned certainties? Where self-knowledge is inevitably precarious, historical knowledge is unlikely to be secure. To learn about the formal status of past women is not necessarily to learn much about the operation or the balance of past sexual power. A major surprise of Fraser’s book is ...”

“... being a fourmi, a drudge, a slave to the ritual of housewifely duties. Not everyone will accept a self-justification that is based on an intellectual and financial élitism. Whether or not she married Sartre, her critics say, she allowed herself to be dominated by a man. She herself tells us that Adieux is the first of her books not to have been submitted to ...”

“... pace, such productions struck the wrong note. The patriotic epic, except in the debased and self-destructive form of the Bond films, was an offence to the spirit of the age. The old military-imperial spectaculars were acceptable only when infused with anti-war feeling and social satire, as in Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. In ...”

“... but of hygienic precautions which he thought showed lack of faith in God’s arrangements for the self-purging of the body. This was a view typical of the Hasidic wing of the Pharisees. Equally unsatisfactory is G.M. Styler’s attempt to substantiate the Gospel picture of Jesus as a pacifist. He takes it for granted that it is derogatory to Jesus to say that ...”

“... by his father, Peter, who has impressed himself on the public mind, rightly or wrongly, as a self-made authoritarian gifted with inflexible will, prescient ambition and a strikingly neo-Victorian belief in ‘scientific’ progress. It comes as no surprise to learn from the new book on Coe, Running Free, that ‘Peter’ is a name assumed by Coe Sr to ...”

“... and collective action rediscover the miraculous in our symbolic social universe, we will remain self-constituting and engaged.’ The task for sociology is therefore a tough one: America, in a post-Vietnam depression and in a mood of enthusiasm for ‘increasing financial capitalisation of magic’, may well need the alternative succour of ...”

“... world – thus failing to explain why the rank and file seem so regularly to find sound reasons of self-interest to support their leaders’ supposedly selfish causes. The catch-phrases in the Marxist explanation of why workers put up with the unbearable – the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of the employers, the ‘co-optation’ of the unions, the weight of ...”

“... of Eden belonged to the tragedy of the peasantry in the 19th century. The family farm in Wyre was self-sufficient, they ate bannocks, butter, cheese and milk made by themselves from their own fields and their own animals, they sent the wool from their own sheep to a Border town to be made up into clothes, and they ate so much crab and lobster from the sea ...”

“... instance I wanted to say “regime”, I would have to write “the socially manifest focus of non-self” or some such rubbish.’ Such modern and (here the word fits) timeless instances lighten – and enlighten – the somewhat dense historical detail of Stern’s texts, dense because he requires of himself, as of others, that arguments and assertions ...”