“... active sections, of their following expect a great deal more. It is a tribute to the coherence and self-confident culture of the British working class that it has produced trade-union leaders who for clear-sighted and articulate service of the interests of their members outshine any in the world. Yet working-class figures in the political leadership of the ...”

“... era. Man is faulted for ‘failing to use to a sufficient purpose his possibilities’, for ‘self-betrayal’ and inauthenticity, for his death-wish, and for sins against the environment (‘They tore apart my ozone, carbonised my oxygen, acidified my refreshing rain’). God is not unmoved by ‘violence, corruption, blasphemy, beastliness, sin beyond ...”

“... a touch over his pupils’ heads, hoping his allusions will be ‘looked up’ and encourage self-improvement. A teacher may use this technique: but a novelist, supposedly talking with equals, may offend his readers and spoil his plain story, as Aldous Huxley did, making us feel he is patronising us, showing off. Burgess knows his pupils’ reluctance to ...”

“... combined with his need to be liked, which drove him eventually to the unreasonable lengths of self-vindication of which this latest book, and its mammoth predecessor, are classics. There were already signs of paranoia at an early stage of his Prime Ministership. What was called his kitchen Cabinet at Number 10 was more like a medieval court, a centre of ...”

“... a single episode, garnished with a gloss of elementary social anthropology, is meant to proclaim self-evident significance. This is simply the imaginative re-creation of a momentous enterprise, set in the framework of an important historical argument. As such it will become one of the classics of modern historical literature. Much of the originality of the ...”

“... precarious structure of urban societies whose social cohesion depended on the orderly conduct of a self-regulating international economy. All the belligerent states sought therefore to pre-empt domestic collapse through a Napoleonic Vernichtungs strategie, aimed at the rapid overthrow of the enemy armies in the field. The task was beyond their powers, and in ...”

“... diseases. On a Victorian family holiday in Italy, a young woman outwardly reconciled to flattened, self-forgetting spinsterhood suddenly sees the new prospect of a new sort of life; the young painter she has fallen in love with climbs into the Appennines the next day, achieves a remarkable sketch, glimpses his calling for the first time, and falls to his death ...”

“... franchise in a non-racial, federal (not confederal) South Africa and only wants the rights of self-chosen cultural groups recognised. Saul himself reinforces government propaganda when he equates ‘genuine democratisation and transfer of power to the black majority’. Post-Apartheid democracy is supposed to be non-racial, based on colourblind individual ...”

“... final illness – asking someone else to undertake this act of destruction for him. Was it a self-exculpating ploy, a way of saying ‘publish against my wishes’? (This is how W.H. Auden’s executors have construed his destructive last command.) One correspondent is notably absent from those represented in the Observer selection, Miss Jones ...”

“... significantly impedes our perception of the fact that the Gulf War was an atrocity, committed from self-interested motives by the United States and her allies. We thus have a substantial politico-ethical thesis within a theoretical. It is somehow redolent of the age in which we live that chapter after chapter is devoted to justifying the practice of claiming ...”

“... to get married again without taking warning from the Wife of Bath may be one of Chaucer’s common self-simplifications, Pearsall still sees parts of Chaucer’s analysis of marriage as ‘unblinkingly hostile’, and perhaps – though this is approaching boundaries of speculation Pearsall will not cross – the result of the working out of some psychosexual ...”

“... New York, that Jewish city, than anywhere else. Gilman is of course interested in the element of self-abasing Jewish behaviour caused by centuries of oppression; circumcision is still a Jewish problem in the USA, even though it seems all boy babies get circumcised unless the parents forbid it. There are, says Gilman, ‘continuities of images of the Jews in ...”

“... prosperous and active cultures, mainly Anglo-Saxon, are given to behaving with a valetudinarian self-regard, which he calls ‘healthism’ and which, in America, has sought to ‘make longevity the principal measure of a good life’. ‘To be a survivor,’ Klein notes, ‘is to acquire moral distinction.’ Few people would say they wanted to die ...”

“... this is horribly complete. To measure the astonishing degree to which the ethos of Yugoslavia’s self-liberation could overcome hatred and revenge one needs perhaps to have seen the depths out of which it had to climb. That it did so Woodward, no kind of sentimentalist, is able to confirm. Why then this ferocious disintegration? Why its appalling speed and ...”

“... narratives as they reminisce. They engage a million man-hours of refugee-time in introspection and self-analysis, and consequently feel more depressed at the end of the day than they were at dawn. They are suicidal. A great many of them are religiously reflective, pondering on the curse that has paid them and their country a visitation. Only much later, in the ...”