“... its potential for awfulness. The idea that Mrs Thatcher might think Britain should become self-sufficient in wood is the novel’s only implausible flight of fancy, and it is imaginatively a good one. The image of the British countryside replaced by conifer plantations conveys the banality of Thatcherism and its meanness of spirit, and it lends the ...”

“... feasts. All the same, the gestures of the officers, forks and glasses in hand, will seem less self-evidently absurd to anyone who has read van Alkemade or Schama and is aware of the importance of festival rituals in 17th-century culture. This example is very far from being the only one in which Schama juxtaposes the evidence of contemporary writers with ...”

“... or humility towards movies’, as making ‘only a cynical show of superiority and self-importance’. In the title essay Wenders deplores the incapacity of modern audiences, indulged and debased by the hollow consumerist ethic such criticism reflects, to appreciate the beauty of John Ford’s Westerns; he is pained by ‘the increasingly ...”

“... then abandons them and asserts its own programme and values with an astonishing lack of caution or self-examination. Anyone who asks RLT proponents to look at their own assumptions is not treated as an intellectual soul-mate, but instead angrily denounced as a bigoted member of the old order. RLT brooks no opposition and no questioning. (Joseph Schumpeter’s ...”

“... got the wide reading it deserves. The standard mythology that pictures gays as pouty, shallow and self-obsessed doesn’t come close to applying here. Two things happen to most of the gay men in the book: they contract Aids and suffer horribly from it, or they devote themselves to a friend or to friends with the syndrome. They visit, give presents, cook and ...”

“... two hundred years it has been impossible to speak of nationalism ... socialism and democracy, of self-determination for peoples and nations, of government by law and of the belief in human rights ... of ‘the people’s’ demands, of ... ‘secular’ education, political propaganda and the state’s role in promoting ‘enlightenment’, of popular ...”

“... than it tries to look: here again what is striking is not the new achievement but the new self-admiring rhetoric. Is it the case, he asks, that there is a general belief in the obvious (traditional, authoritarian) single meaning of a text, a belief which must therefore be demystified and deconstructed? No, few hold such an opinion; what is being ...”

“... is that their defence of minority culture was undermined by their obsession with the very forms of self-promotion and publicity-seeking which they so stridently condemned. There is a need for serious thinking about Leavis’s legacy, but unfortunately this book does not provide it. Ten years after his death, his literary-critical writings tend to promote ...”

“... end of police brutality, left-wing Israelis were primarily concerned with the damage to their own self-image and to Israel’s reputation abroad. As such, Benvenisti argues, ‘their reaction to the trauma was not a painful confrontation with reality but an almost desperate attempt to reconstruct their web of evasions and excuses and, most of all, to believe ...”

“... puzzled and frightened farming family from Kalenberg, which was shown at the exhibition, are self-reliant, plain-living, God-fearing folk of a kind especially popular in North American art and literature. Looking at pictures such as this, we should ask ourselves whether, or rather to what extent, the character of the painting was determined by the regime ...”

“... by analysis of Alfred’s strangely protesting will. Smyth digs further into issues of national self-respect which may still seem painful. The Chronicle line is that Wessex policy was never to pay Danegeld but rather to fight every time. Other kingdoms might knuckle under – Mercia, for example, ruled according to the Chronicle’s scornful 874 entry by ...”

“... in his search by the work of Auguste Laurent, whom he later wrote out of the record possibly for self-interested reasons. That, when he presented his results publicly, he expressed the clarity of his mature understanding rather than the confused path that had led him there. And that we should therefore be sceptical of scientists’ accounts of their own ...”

“... Ayckbourn testifies that Pinter was an extremely nice guy – but simply an absolute belief in the self sufficiency of the text.’ There’s not much hope for a biography whose subject can’t be brusque or rude, and Billington’s relish for stereotypes doesn’t help us much either. This is a world of bedrocks and watersheds, where people stay the course ...”

“... through a soup of methane and ammonia and carbon dioxide. The resulting amino acids had to form self-replicating chains of protein, and these to turn into cells deriving energy from the only supply around: the Sun. Which meant they had to develop the ability to photosynthesise, in order to suck carbon dioxide from the primeval air, capture the carbon to ...”

“... the loss of a wife he has belatedly learned to love, looking back over forty years to another self, squaring accounts with the past. His starting-point is the year 1926, in Monaco, where young Edmund is fashionably adrift among the gaming wheels and the champagne. An accident brings him to the notice of Roscoe Hamilton, a big-game hunter who is planning ...”