“... speaker writes home to his mother about his brother’s arrest. Poetry satisfied the ‘need for self-expression at a formative period of my life’. But politics came with it: Johnson joined the British Black Panther Party while still at school, and was introduced to Black consciousness literature for the first time: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black ...”

“... Santagata argues that Boccaccio suffered from ‘psychological fragility’ that often led to self-sabotage. Emotionally unstable and intellectually restless, he experienced frequent mood swings that sapped his confidence. Late in life he was certain he had been a failure, especially when he compared his output with Dante’s or Petrarch’s. Yet the same ...”

“... The answer is, of course, censorship. Not imposed – though that, too, possibly – so much as self-imposed. The FO in London – Berlin does not say so, but it can be inferred – knew that the Americans were reading the British Embassy signals: it therefore wanted nothing that burned, nothing contentious or embarrassing – above all, nothing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his theory. Thus, even if his opponents are wrong to regard ‘unconscious knowledge’ as self-contradictory, like ‘unconscious pain’, Chomsky is not warranted in treating it as no more perplexing than the notion of a largely unconscious physiological process like digestion. While he alludes to the problems that currently exercise philosophers ...”

“... healthy contempt for birth and breeding. Leavis was thus already a fine, intuitive polemicist and self-advertiser, who hardly needed much help from acolytes like Ford. The aggression built into the master’s manner, with its churlish tone calculated to knock the politeness out of polite letters, had a more direct and heady appeal to the young than a Guide to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”