“... white employers, and eventually they began to organise in secret societies, or izigebengus, in self-defence. The services performed by prostitutes and liquor-vendors were, of course, of a quite different order. Initially both prostitution and liquor were promoted in the interests of the employers rather than the workers: like the liquor-vendors, the ...”

“... as an ex-collaborator, laments Hitchcock’s ‘profound ignorance of human motivation’ as a self-evident weakness: but we could note that we’re all profoundly ignorant on this matter, and that the mysteriously expressive surface of the film actor’s face is an appropriate medium for this truth.The making of films, an extended process needing a large ...”

“... end too effectively. Sir Angus knows why. The true occasion of Bernard Sands’s fatal access of self-knowledge – of the sadistic component, that is, in his sexual nature – comes to him in the manner of his reaction to an incident in Leicester Square at night. What Sir Angus calls the ‘strong narrating side’ of the novel lies here, and the illstarred ...”

“... never seen why Sartre should have been praised for inverting and falsifying this truism), and the self-important spongers of Venice no more so than the rest.By this time one is yearning for the stubborn But against which all these sequent waves of fairmindedness will go up in foam. Larkin’s timing is perfect, and his But of a sentence is petrified into a ...”

“... problem? These were questions which he sometimes asked himself; hence his recurrent dream of rural self-sufficiency, the ‘Golden Country’ of 1984, the Henley of Coming Up for Air, the Hebridean adventure which, according to some people, killed him. There is a passage in his War Diary for 1942 in which his rusticrecluse yearnings and his social-scientific ...”

“... in France, have compared France’s political leadership unfavourably with New Labour and its self-congratulatory commitment to ‘modernisation’ and a broadly neoliberal economic programme. According to such analyses, the French, in order to sort themselves out, simply need to become more like us. The bicycle ‘race’ in Amsterdam last year after the ...”

“... were not overthrown because they were demonised (assassinations were more often the result of self-serving rivalries within the palace than of political principle or moral outrage), they were demonised because they were overthrown. If one of the many attempts on Hadrian’s life had been successful, he, too, would most probably have been written into ...”

“... folkways he so lately debunked, turning native on his own patch. Latter-day examples include the self-styled ‘Post-Modern bourgeois liberal’ Richard Rorty. The politics of this turn tend to the folksy – in an arch, snowstorm-paperweight-collecting kind of way – if not downright völkisch. And, as Clifford Geertz has noted, the wogs start long before ...”

“... court artists display, to change one word in Erving Goffman’s classic title, the presentation of self in celebrity life. When they pretend to uncover the authentic private person hidden beneath the public performance, they are just engaging in another form of play. Some Emily Post fans were appalled at Covarrubias’s depiction of the mistress of etiquette ...”

“... general worry about identity politics: ‘If what matters about me is my individual and authentic self, why is so much contemporary talk of identity about large categories – race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality – that seem so far from the individual?’ But much of it is specific to race consciousness, for race in Appiah’s view is such a ...”

“... who fancies himself ‘the last of the Bohemians’ and survives, he likes to say, on ‘air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches and ketchup’. He claims that he understands the cawing of seagulls so well that he can translate poetry into it, and notes that the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are particularly suited to ...”

“... Action – the Dust Bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie, the cabaret bluesman Josh White and the self-invented folk bard Pete Seeger. The Oklahoma-born Guthrie, the most enduring of the three, was the culmination of those country protest singers – the Jim Garlands and Aunt Molly Jacksons – recruited into the Popular Front during the union struggles of ...”

“... and no training in its methods and ideas. Ethnopsychiatry was, as McCulloch says, ‘very much a self-enclosed enterprise’. The effects of the professional isolation of ethnopsychiatry, within medicine and from anthropology, were exacerbated by the fact that the most extensive facilities were in the settler colonies, and the ethnopsychiatrists were members ...”

“... to quote such large chunks of text, and to allow in, for example, whole passages of elaborate (and self-deceiving) moral analysis: Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil’s sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment ...”

“... was soon to be both heavy and clumsy. The Mirror was saved financially but sadly disfigured by his self-promotion and promises of vast wealth for the readers: assuredly, he lacked the newspaper sense of a Beaverbrook. At least he was against any proliferation of nipples. The new broom had his principles and had given evidence against the publishers of Last ...”