“... 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 ...”

“... usually expected of the public servant’. It went on to warn that ‘if some measure of self-policing (or self-discipline) is not instituted’, the Trustees might find themselves obliged ‘to take a more active part in the management’ of the institution. Since then, there has been no more speculation about the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reactions (for example, how to run from a mad dog) were learnt from childhood comics. He remarks self-deprecatingly in ‘Street Entertainment’: I’m merely a reporter whose truth lies in diction clear as water. Such clarity may be as suspect, the pun on ‘lies’ suggests, as the Stalinist mud satirised in his translations from Otto Orban, for whom ...”

“... passages are going to strike people as lurid, because she allows herself some moments of overt self-justification in which she makes sarcastic calls for a literature of ‘modesty and social decorum ... a literature that is unassertive, limpid, economical and lean’ (all of which The Last Magician is most certainly not). Such tactics are still considered ...”

“... problems, Beyond the Limits offers us a vision of Armageddon and a generalised injunction to self-denial. In the aftermath of the Rio Summit it is as well to be reminded just whom this self-denial will hurt. Rio was only partly about the environment; it was also about the fears of the wrold’s poor countries that 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 ...”

“... but the technology of warfare has transformed the moral and practical problems associated with self-defence. Nobody claims a right to own a personal nuclear deterrent, or even a private heat-seeking missile, though some over-anxious Americans would like to have their own tanks or bazookas. Many would prefer a virtually complete ban on guns. Joyce ...”

“... a speciality of this, in lines which often have something of the giggle in them of an affectedly self-conscious children’s game: ‘I love to hide and hear ’em hunt.’ Hearing them hunt becomes the poet’s pleasure, and a source of teasing power. For Emily Brontë the passions of Gondal (‘Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers’) carried the ...”

“... Foot’s idolatry of Bevan was somewhat soft-headed. Bevan was, after all, a childish, petulant, self-centred man, far too convinced of his own charm and persuasiveness. In the end he quite royally let his own followers down while always expecting them to do his will. When Tribune had the nerve to criticise him, his wife, Jennie Lee, tried to have the paper ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”