“... writing seems misty-eyed to the point of simple-mindedness – with LPs reduced to the level of self-help manuals – but DeCurtis is doing no more than articulate the conservatism that lies at the heart of both rock criticism and the music industry. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” and it’s not what they wanted after all. The idea that pop music was ...”

“... Olivier’s triptych by describing her lavishly sadistic treatment for the maximum offence of self-abuse) she closed on this note: ‘Time and again a former pupil comes to see me, to reminisce or perhaps for another purpose. Boys who have passed through my hands have gone on to win the highest awards their country can bestow, for gallantry, ...”

“... or, if so, where the ashes had been put. Her letters are beguiling, but quite often apologetic and self-accusing. Her strange spelling (perhaps dyslexia) grew no better. On the honey labels which she designed for David Garnett at Charleston, even ‘Charleston’ is spelled wrong. This was in spite of her great capacity for enjoyment and her strong physical ...”

“... unconsciously reinforcing F.R. Leavis’s contention that Othello tends to substitute sonorous, self-advertising rhetoric for self-analysis. Robeson, of course, could not have benefited from Leavis’s interpretation: not only because it appeared too late, but because it presented – or could be taken as presenting ...”

“... keeps emerging: their crowds are in constant need of surveillance and policing; the desperate self-imposed task of the theorist is to reduce the crowd’s protean qualities to manageable positive laws, to master the irrational through ‘the social defence’ of science and reason. The point was not, as today, to give out identity cards thereby to ...”

“... O’Connell moulded the institutional Catholic Church in Ireland to become a more independent and self-assured body, while at the same time he became increasingly reliant upon Catholic clerical support to mobilise the Catholic electorate in his favour and away from the patriarchal control of their Protestant landlords. These strategies derived from ...”

“... longer in his right mind’, but ‘visited by voices that come ... from deep within the self’. Automatism, he suggested, should be investigated, and offered for consideration a poem of his own written automatically in a state of trance. (Not surprisingly, it differed very little from others written presumably in a condition of full ...”

“... We have lost such confidence. Imperial decline and economic mismanagement have replaced historical self-congratulation with historical self-criticism. Middle-class virtues have become as unmentionable as aristocratic ones. And so the reputation of 1688 is once more in decline. Macaulay, hailing the uniqueness of England’s ...”

“... Benighted in a mountain hut, the two women cleave to each other during a night of lesbian self-revelation which brings the prose to heights which the narrative and characterisation cannot carry. Anna’s over-warm narration put me unwillingly on the side of the life-deniers – if only she had been a little quieter. In Molly Keane’s pictures of ...”

“... on trial in the current academic debates: this and the belief in the consistency of identity, the self as a seamless web. Already the richly humanistic efforts of Geoffrey Hartman, Pierre Bourdieu and Christopher Norris are rescuing the work of Heidegger and de Man without endangering the principle that ideology and text are invariably (if ...”

“... goes off on its own, creating its own object, a picture of itself rather than a prophecy. The bold self-portrait on the cover of Julian Symons’s excellent selection from Lewis’s work in a sense tells us all we need to know about his manner, which is a kind of distillation of Art Déco – fierce, highly-coloured, angular, ugly, but with a grotesque tactile ...”

“... learned to appreciate one another’s talents. Genovese concludes: ‘Educated Southerners, as self-proclaimed heirs to medieval chivalry, understood true nobility to rest on personal virtue, concluding that men, therefore, faced each other as equals.’ The last remark gives a clue about what is suspect in Genovese’s argument. Were Southern slaveholders ...”

“... of Listless Gluttony’, ‘A Blissful and Drinkable Eternity’. The essays are undisciplined and self-indulgent, both in spite and because of the arcane references and scores of footnotes: The mirabilia of the charlatans, the ‘secrets of deception’ (‘they make people appear without heads or with asses’ heads,’ noted Pietro Passi, author of Della ...”

“... at this ingratitude, but his own account suggests ample cause for it. The trouble was that self-appointed experts from further east were forever telling the independent-minded settlers what was best for them. Eastern Montana was apparently so empty, so devoid of physical and social culture, that it could serve as the laboratory for any harebrained ...”

“... were communal and physical – football, rugby, brass bands, dances, bowling – or to do with self-improvement: evening classes in drawing, politics, local history, literature. The ethos was philanthropic and optimistic. Working men’s clubs, institutes, social and recreation clubs; all were built to answer the general call for the good and uncostly use ...”