“... and just 52 of the 199 seats in the National Assembly.Over the past sixteen years, Orbán’s self-declared ‘illiberal’ regime had pioneered methods for entrenching far-right populism in power. In 2010, Hungary’s electoral system had delivered Fidesz a two-thirds parliamentary majority, which he used to pass a new constitution, staff the state ...”

“... to die without knowing it – for example, in sleep. The second phase is that of the Death of the Self. The individual begins to conceive of his death as personal, and as preceding an intimate accounting with God. Elaborate wills, giving among other things detailed instructions for the disposal of the body, for masses, tombs and epitaphs, accompanied a new ...”

“... of conformity glorifying physical power, simplicity of speech and mind, softness of feeling, and self-satisfaction with the state not of manliness, but of being a boy’. Again, we must bear fashion in mind. These childish readers, when grown to rule the Empire, seemed to Santayana the sweetest young boyish masters the world had ever seen. The critics ...”

“... for her ‘sunny benignity’ and ‘graceful radiance’, and even referred to her as ‘a second self of the poet’, but biographers have until now had little to put beside the colourful relationships with Annette and Dorothy. Mary, it is true, was credited by Wordsworth with the two best lines of his best-known poem – They flash upon that inward eye ...”

“... a damn what they want. We have always called the shots ... The Irish Republic is no more than a self-governing annexe of rich men’s dubious neocolonialism. We want a democratic socialist republic for all Ireland. The IRA follow the Moran line, and embrace a racialist view of Irish history based on attitudes of the late 19th century (and, ironically ...”

“... it could be marginally cheaper than other forms of energy, but that it could be made effectively self-renewing and effectively harmless to man, beast or plant. None of the proposed self-renewing alternatives – solar, geothermal, winds, waves, tides, ocean thermal gradients, satellite collectors etc – comes anywhere ...”

“... biologist arguing passionately that, of course, genes are not selfish, because they are not self-aware beings, to which alone the term ‘selfish’ can properly be applied. I found it impossible to respond to his passion. I suppose that Dawkins referred to genes as selfish because he imagined that no one would take him literally. I do not regard genes ...”

“... by no means an unknown figure. His pre-Revolutionary career is generally known through his own self-justifying memoirs, written not long before his execution. The archives of the STN, together with the Paris police records, tell a different story. They show us not so much the pure and persecuted apostle of Enlightenment as a man deeply engaged in the shady ...”

“... for two days’ work directing a television commercial – and the same day his other self, the loony-left personality, is admiring Edward Bond’s play exposing Shakespeare as ‘a man who Sold Out to the Bourgeoisie and no longer stood up for the Progressive Currents of his Time’. (My capitals.) He then makes two commercials for the Royal ...”

“... to the contrary is simply wrong. The point isn’t argued; the rival view is simply treated as self-evidently absurd and repellent in itself and in its consequences, one of which is the practice of treating the Bible as a ‘separate cognitive zone’. That it was so treated for centuries is dismissed as an error one should no longer endorse. Barr remarks ...”

“... Immersion in landscape seemed to return Clampitt to that pre-subjective moment of joy before self and object become two things. Consequently, nothing made her happier as a writer than the challenge to make the physical world appear to others as it seemed to her. The tornados of her childhood, for ...”

“... of three centuries later so cunningly used by Jonathan Spence to construct his Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-hsi. If we had to judge Khubilai on the basis of his appearance in later Chinese historical writings we might never be tempted to read a full biography of him at all. Many of them cheat by taking a narrow view of legitimacy and not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... conditions; but the Antonine world described in his opening chapters is on the brink of self-destruction, and this will repeat the self-destructions of the Augustan principate and the Roman republic before it. The causes of this decay lie in the indissolubility, yet incompatibility, of republic and ...”