“... reproducing the means of life to producing predominantly goods of symbolic value for expressive self-presentational purposes.’ So we may apply the analogy of semantics in order to understand societies. We shall find the meanings of social actions and speeches by looking for what Austin called their performative and illocutionary functions. The things that ...”

“... his native Elmet, Dylan Thomas’s half-loved Wales, Hartley’s sexy Norfolk, the Georgians’ self-conscious shires, Housman’s country of the broken heart. Grahame’s pagan Thames Valley and Orwell’s lost Oxfordshire village in Coming Up for Air – ‘one of the most powerful novels ever written about the threat to what we now call the ...”

“... tough, awkward youth, full of strong feelings and resentments, but he possessed a basic self-confidence rooted in a total acceptance of who and what he was. As a fighter, he was sometimes frightened, and he makes no bones about it. He was one of those detailed to kill British agents in their homes in the original Bloody Sunday of November 1920. In ...”

“... and of the pressures under which they operated. The style is the same as that of his earlier work: self-effacing, unemotional and efficient. The clash of ideas and personalities is relegated to the background; lines of institutional development and decision-making set the parameters of the story. One senses that precisely because of the highly-charged and ...”

“... cannot even find a week to take you to New Orleans? Why, when you are so intelligent, explain your self-destructiveness as though nothing was in your control? Why indulge your taste for sitting on rotten boughs and complain when they break beneath you? The abrogation of the conventions which distinguish writer and character spread this tetchiness. Kate’s ...”

“... Gaitskell’s death. It is a sweet moment for those of us who followed him. It would, however, be self-indulgent to savour it for too long. Hillhead has consolidated Jenkins’s claims to lead the SDP and the Alliance. It has not determined what sort of party the SDP is to be, or what strategy the Alliance is to follow. Since the launch of the party a year ...”

“... individual and public interest’ is brought about by ‘competitive markets and pursuit of self-interest by individuals’. Interestingly, a much smaller proportion of Conservative MPs accepted this claim; and among economists, business economists were more sceptical of it than others. Sen, while not denying all the often-praised virtues of the market ...”

“... from Rebecca West, who trained for the stage – according to her son she remained ‘an incurable self-dramatiser’ – and who took her pen-name from Rosmersholm. But the inarticulacy and dimness are all Sunflower’s own. On the first page of the novel she is being dumb about machinery; on the last page she is seen worrying about her party dress and the ...”

“... narrow individuality and their sense of history. The burgh, the town which is – or was – self-governing as a tiny urban unit and at the same time closely linked to the farming and crofting world of its hinterland, is in many ways the real locus of Scottish history, and also of Scottish imagining and writing. Most fiction which is not patrician in ...”

“... more often associated with military, forensic, archaeological and medical applications. A self-styled ‘art-diagnostician’, and a non-fictional character in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, he is an awkward maverick among the cabals of the Italian art establishment. The composition of The Battle of Anghiari is minutely documented, but one piece of ...”

“... are doubled and the questions revolve around large and impenetrable subjects: the mystery of the self (‘Why am I troubled by this encounter with HB? Why am I also vaguely excited by it?’); the opacity of others (‘When had Hettie discovered she was pregnant? … But how could she be pregnant? … Had she been lying?’); and the uncertainty of most ...”

“... of heavy-duty stuff about thermodynamic equilibria, neural attractors, morphodynamic activity, self-organising systems or, heaven help us, the quantum mechanical collapse of probability waves; nothing Deacon says explains why it should. What one longs for, but doesn’t get, are the circumstantial details that, in Pooh-Bah’s words, ‘give artistic ...”

“... a censor sitting in an office, blue pencil in hand and red tea by his side: Chinese censorship is self-censorship, and although what to avoid is generally known, the discussions about limits take place between writer and publisher, not writer and state, and can be more flexible than we imagine. Murong also told us about the latest Chinese meme: an old clip ...”

“... In the US, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 insisted that addiction was not a disease but a ‘self-inflicted moral infirmity’, which meant that American doctors who prescribed to addicts were liable for criminal prosecution. In Britain, the resolutely non-penal Rolleston system treated it as a disease requiring medical care. Neither country succeeded in ...”

“... with other characters), she gives her convincing motives and sets her up as a counterpart to the self-made men the Victorians so admired. ‘My ultimate fate in life,’ Lady Audley explains, ‘depended upon my marriage, and I concluded that if I was indeed prettier than my schoolfellows, I ought to marry better.’ She is not a heartless ...”