“... she is in her straightforward, unaffected vein. Her heightened style lets her down; she becomes self-indulgent. Some readers may like it, of course. But as their grief died down, Emily and Caroline, still daughters in their minds, began to hear their parents speak. So began a colloquy that would go on until they in turn left the world to their grieving ...”

“... of what the same speaker calls ‘this world-cataclysmic drama’. As for the second passage, how self-important would you have to be (at 15) to ‘become conscious of an oscillation of temperament’, or ‘appreciate a countervailing vision of tolerant scepticism’? Surely neither life nor Sheila Rowbotham is like that. But the sense of whatever authentic ...”

“... it. This is an uncharacteristically personal passage which seems, on the one hand, dramatically self-conscious, and on the other, to be an attempt to answer the Kantian question: ‘what am I for?’ Yeats is describing the revolutionary’s sense of being a dead man on leave, of having no personal life, but in doing so he is also engaging in a piece of ...”

“... is the opposite: they are hugely outnumbered by the tutorial drones, the committee bores, the self-consciously Great and Good, and the peculiar tribe of Oxford man-boys. This more mediocre majority is alarmed by the sheer ability of some of the mavericks and, even more, by their habit of truth-telling. This means that they are ‘not sound’, that their ...”

“... to admit that they probably irradiated some innocent bystanders. The United States Government self-righteously fights any liability tooth and claw in the courts. The British Government hides behind an Act of Parliament which was never intended to assist in avoiding culpability. On 3 October 1952, the British Government, anxious to retain its role as a ...”

“... Fleetwood that employees should not abandon the attitudes that they had held when they worked as self-employed. There may be truth in the assessment of their motives, but it is not based on direct information from the only people who could provide it. By the Sweat of their Brow is a more scholarly work, which has grown out of a doctoral thesis. It sets out ...”

“... to his wife Edwina one has merely to read the part of Amanda Wingfield in that first great play: self-deludingly optimistic, desperately domineering, a faded Southern belle marooned in a noisy, dirty city which no longer recognised her kind. Sickly, solitary Tom was contemptuously dismissed as ‘Miss Nancy’, but it was the fate of his sister Rose which ...”

“... at the outset, turned himself into a man for all seasons, all things to all men. Modelling his self-presentation upon the actor Talma, he studied his audiences and acted out his diverse roles – in the Academy, at Court, in the Museum, before the public – with consummate professionalism. And his skill in performance allowed him to remain hidden, the man ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... presents to his biographer does not involve tact. It is, rather, his own fuming, fulminating self, venting his increasingly despairing view of fallen man and contemporary society in a volcanic flow of written and spoken prose, an unmatchable style that expresses the man as graphically as none but the most gifted biographer can hope to do. He never wrote ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Management Initiative is actually making to efficiency: but perhaps that, too, was on the index of self-prohibited topics. It is harder to guess at the reasons for leaving out Europe, a word which does not appear even once in the lectures. I suppose that, apart from the escalating problem of the Community budget, the EEC has not loomed large in the ...”

“... is surely limited: ‘the world’s mistake in Oliver Cromwell’ was surely largely a case of self-deception. Cromwell and others around him did not sell out a cause in which they had once believed: they opposed a multiplicity of causes in which they had never believed. Cromwell had always believed in the right of the Saints to be captains (not ...”