“... and end, Singer’s conservatism is not a blind refusal. He is not in this a reactionary. The self-referential nature of Modernism, art aware of and concerned with its own processes, is not absent from his work. There are frequent stories about stories, stories about writers. The Warsaw Yiddish Writers’ club is a frequent setting or departure point in ...”

“... They are in the mainstream of public life. They can be safely quoted today as the source of self-evident truths. Because of these common-sense qualities, their ideas virtually monopolised British political thinking in the modern period. That did not mean that Britain was intellectually isolationist. German scholarship was much admired and emulated in ...”

“... lifts him up high and then casts him down. For instance, he is described as displaying supreme self-confidence in North Africa, so it is disconcerting to find him also described as ‘unsure of himself, hesitant, often depressed, irritable, liable to make snap judgments on insufficient information, defensive in both his mood and his tactics’. At the ...”

“... inhuman, so that the poet can acknowledge European history and suffering without sentimentality or self-regard. Thus in ‘Distant Howling’ Holub describes how in 1885 Pasteur saved his first patient, the nine-year-old Joseph Maister, with his new vaccine: Pasteur died of ictus ten years later. The janitor Meister fifty-five years later committed suicide ...”

“... Pancirolli wrote a very popular book on it in the 16th century, and it was often remarked by self-deprecating moderns that they were like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. The antiquity of this figure is the subject of a very learned and also very amusing book by Robert Merton; the received wisdom is that it goes at least as far back as the ...”

“... this includes the best justification of the role of the judge in that system. This is not only a self-referential but a normative task: the best sense of the law is the sense, relative to the constraints of fit with what is already given, that makes the system the best it could be – best in both fit and substance, balanced against one another in a way ...”

“... a magazine for the working woman, and its title, in the best traditions of the me-generation, was Self. The cover advertised articles with titles like ‘The Problems of the Kept Man’ and ‘What if He Says No?’ But what attracted my attention was the rather Californian injunction flashed in bold letters across the top: ‘Let’s Be Real!’ Of such ...”

“... for the peaceful resolution of disputes and to the observance of agreements reached. It seemed self-evident – certainly it constituted a fundamental principle of the old Ministry of Labour for the fifty years of its existence – that a system of industrial relations predicated on the relative autonomy of employer and worker-representatives was more ...”

“... the House of Commons in the tones befitting that palladium of our liberties. Walter Bagehot’s self-image was no less vivid, though certainly different, as he projected it onto the persona of the modern reviewer, ‘glancing lightly from topic to topic, suggesting deep things in jest, unfolding unanswerable argument in an absurd illustration’, for all ...”

“... preference, in intellectual history, for the subversive and rancorous over the official and self-congratulatory’. Even here, the irony is strong, the pairs of contrasting attitudes unattractive. The obvious worry is that the second narration will compromise the objectivity of the first. The prose, which consists of intricately-crafted and qualified ...”

“... Though words are just where Thatcher couldn’t match her. It’s easy for the Yanks to preach self-help: There’s so much protein they can help themselves. In Britain we’d be feeding children kelp And watching them grow up the size of elves Were we to heed the age-old Tory yelp That’s heard when the tinned goods on the shop shelves Are priced so as ...”

“... terms of other people’s malevolence, rather than his unfittedness. To write the biography of so self-centred and self-absorbed a figure almost exclusively from his own papers necessarily results in the tortured reasoning, the special pleading and the selective use of evidence which are all displayed here in a vain attempt ...”

“... under vow, where Johnson inserts a whole stanza from Cowley’s ‘Ode upon Liberty’. Look under self, and you will find 22 quotations from Shakespeare. Johnson designed the Dictionary as a work of entertainment, and instruction, as well as of cold information. He embellished his work with aphorisms, anecdotes an pieces of information drawn from ...”

“... life – Dante’s profound understanding of the nature of the encounter between past and present, self and other, which cannot be explained in terms of influence or style but only in terms of the whole person. Our relation to the masters we choose from the past – or who seem to choose us – is partly our relation to our fathers, partly to our ...”

“... from high romance: the dying hero, and the great undying love of lovers who are at once a single self and complementary parts of a whole. This combination of ideas allows us to feel both a wrongness in Jackson himself and a goodness around him (female – located in this first wife, and then in the baby daughter towards whom love for Jackson is shifted). In ...”