“... when the bay here was deserted. Had she tailed him in order to make one last bootless act of self-abasement manifest itself in Stone? He entered the ferry, no more than a full-size rowing boat, and waved goodbye to Miss Kate. She waved goodbye perhaps affectionately. Startled, doltish-looking Jane reappeared with ice-creams from the store. She noted ...”

“... can accomplish with no more than normal difficulty. The result for dyslexics is often low self-esteem and poor achievement. There are, however, compensations. Dyslexia does not affect intelligence or verbal skill, and in finding their own ways of reading and writing they (or perhaps I should say, we) often develop novel viewpoints and new approaches ...”

“... a great deal of trouble getting paid for his commission. Both groom and boy look quite stern and self-possessed, and though both are the owner’s servants, they seem anything but servile and are so indifferent to our regard as to appear almost arrogant. The reason may be that they have a skill which we do not share. They know about horses and this horse in ...”

“... or segments are devoted to analysis of the use of ceremony or ritual in creating or promoting self-identity and institutional loyalty or the sense of mystique which has always been part of Oxford’s appeal. The great religions apart, it is hard to think of institutions in Western civilisation more self-consciously ...”

“... birth to Modernism it powerfully mobilised elements of a prewar cultural crisis and gave it new, self-conscious definition predicated on rupture. Against this orthodoxy several scholars – the art historians Kenneth Silver and Romi Golan, for example – have recently argued that, on the contrary, French art in the Twenties and Thirties was far more ...”

“... Loreburn dug a still deeper pit for the courts by holding the legal disability of women to be so self-evident that ‘it is incomprehensible ... that anyone acquainted with our laws or the methods by which they are ascertained can think, if indeed anyone does think, there is room for argument on such a point.’ There followed in 1913 the judicial exclusion ...”

“... the knowledge in it reached their employees. There was an educational potential here, both of self and of others, which the book’s encyclopedic design reinforced. The intellectual dignity inherent in successful domestic management, cookery included, was a great theme of the Beeton press. ‘As with the commander of an army, or the leader of an ...”

“... project of global empire-building or geopolitics, globalisation today reflects the varied and self-conscious political or economic projects of national élites and transnational social forces pursuing often conflicting visions of world order. Moreover the institutionalisation of world politics has transformed the politics of contesting and managing ...”

“... black and immigrant fiction: the worry that successful upward mobility left one’s former self and people behind. Passing was one version of that negative identity in American literature; its double was ghettoisation-by-recognition, as when Time called the author of Invisible Man the ‘best of US Negro writers’. Then in the 1960s Ellison’s effort ...”

“... i.e. the writer he is hopefully pursuing.’ Pritchett was thinking here of his much younger self, who set off for Paris with a patchy, truncated education and a series of unsatisfying jobs behind him and an intense, but still vague and wholly unrealised, aspiration to become ‘a writer’ in front of him. ‘When, at 20, I got out of the train in the ...”

“... Rév is the guardian of great stores of the past century’s lies and half-truths, deceptions and self-deceptions, representations and re-representations of mass horror and private mendacity, at all levels from the highest councils of state to the lowliest policeman. With sober, biting but never ingenuous hopefulness, he wrings its truths from the dross of ...”

“... preferred and widely recognised style was henceforth officially to be the family’s style, his self-presentations theirs. In response to his nephew’s complaints about these practices, he at one point excuses his meddling by claiming that it was a compassionate response to a plea he had imagined coming from the dead, his brother calling out: ‘Oh, but ...”

“... antagonism or independence. But there is a poetry of pliancy which differs from mere propaganda or self-abasement. In this poetry, the words on the page bring with them an awareness that they might have been different: the strain on the bent knee is kept in view. No one, after all, would take praise in a panegyric as being merely true: the ‘judgment’ it ...”

“... at the time’, just after Fassbinder’s death. ‘Circa 1982-85. Completely unbalanced and self-indulgent. Dissolute, unconventional, ablaze.’ But he wasn’t really capable of doing so – all that is ‘everything I’ve left behind’. And though anyone wanting a straight biography or analysis of Fassbinder’s work would be better off looking ...”

“... the details of his battling life became publicly known and he was sanctified. The image of poor self-sacrificing ‘St Charles’ has been a hindrance ever since.‘We have waited a long time for the definitive full-scale scholarly biography of Charles Lamb,’ Jonathan Bate asserts on the back cover of Eric Wilson’s book, ‘but now it has arrived.’ In ...”