“... inception more than three centuries ago.’ But the joke is right, since a proverb is often slyly self-referential. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ gets not only authority but comedy from its own brevity. Proverbs are inherently convinced, and therefore convince, that ‘Small is beautiful’ (1973). There are many proverbs that praise the little (‘The ...”

“... to be that things have not changed much in the Emerald Isle, another ought to be that their own self-satisfaction is misplaced. Of the ‘facts’ of early English history which Every Schoolboy Knows – Alfred and the Cakes, Canute and the Waves, Harold and the Arrow – only the last has any claim to be in a real sense true (and even that has only ...”

“... articles about their experiences and cunningly sweetening them up with nature notes. ‘Take this self-taught peasant for all in all,’ wrote the Times in 1835. ‘Cobbett remained to the end a peasant,’ wrote G.D.H. Cole in 1924 – and he printed as epigraph to his biography an elegy on Cobbett about ‘gentle nature’s stern prose bard, her mightiest ...”

“... would often seem to elude the Scot. The Magic Glass, then, is not concerned with putting the whole self together. Rather it slices off a childhood, and leaves it disconnected, a preparation for nothing. There remains, however, an uneasiness, as if the author felt obliged to offer something more in the way of a portrait of the editor as a young woman. The ...”

“... Establishment between the wars, and especially the gap between its rhetoric and its ambitions. ‘Self-determination of peoples’ had been a con-trick as far as the defeated peoples of 1918 had been concerned; so was the League of Nations. ‘Reparations’, the Gold Standard, German Democracy, the Little Entente were all of them bogus – like the Maginot ...”

“... a letter-writer, is never, as Hart-Davis’s is, rounded off into what amounts to a lightly-drawn self-portrait. The portrait of Hart-Davis gives design to the collection, and almost makes the Letters into a story (though a very different one from the work in question) in the manner of such novels in letters as Les Liaisons Dangereuses. One appreciates that ...”

“... the admission) projections or extensions, for the most part bitterly ironic, of the poet’s own self as he understands it. De Araujo’s versions from Carlos Drummond are precisely on a par with Felstiner’s from Neruda. Her name may mislead: she is entirely North American by birth and nurture, as her own idiom would leave us in no doubt. Looky now, love ...”

“... is a troubled, Dickensian lost child in a man’s body; the angular Sotgui Kouyate as the saintly self-denying Bhishma has the sad grace of an elongated sculpture from Nigeria or New Guinea, and something of the tragedy of a calcinated Giacometti figure. Just as we have recently learned to see ‘Modernist Primitivism’ in painting and sculpture as a complex ...”

“... a problem did not exist. (She has an interesting parenthesis here concerning the Roman Church’s self-confidence about sex-laws, contrasting the present Pope’s confidence about contraception with his reluctance to denounce Belfast terrorists.) But Hadrian, in another time from Zeno’s, merely ‘prefers to seek his lovers outside the rather hermetic world ...”

“... emergence of Dominion status is one obvious example of that. The commitment, however vague, to self-rule for India, and the dependence on the good will of the Indian princes, are another. The great miscalculation of German policy before 1914 was the assumption that the world was waiting to be liberated from British oppression. Instead, enough of the world ...”

“... led by Pinel and the Tukes is seen as substituting ‘mind-forged manacles’ of guilt and self-control for the chains of the old order; the incarceration of the insane in asylums, and their subjection to the ever watchful gaze of their keepers, emerge as part of a broader development of administrative machinery for the maintenance of social control ...”

“... so-and-so.’ Obviously, any system with more than one such exceptionless principle in it courts self-contradiction. But the notion of an exceptionless moral system as employed by philosophers is that the principles should not conflict – and to avoid that they will normally have to come equipped with ‘unless’ clauses. (It is true that Kant thought ...”

“... all texts are figural’ – rhetorical or fictional – ‘through and through, whatever their self-professed logical status.’ Richard Rorty, who identifies philosophy merely as ‘a kind of writing’, also believes, according to Norris, that ‘literary critics had best give up the idea that philosophy (or “theory”) is capable of solving any ...”

“... She sought to demonstrate their emotional kinship and general compatibility. Her letters became a self-presentation that included an account of her opinions and a depiction of her physical attractions, passionate nature, and quality as a sexual partner – all to convince Hermann of her desirability. She assured him that she was the sort of woman he ...”

“... Foster in seeking a technological base for the change – he seizes on the introduction of the self-acting mule in the spinning industry – but otherwise he will have none of this. He maintains that, on the contrary, the spinners were not sharply divided from the rest of the labour force, from whom they were recruited and who comprised their own wives and ...”