“... belongs to a unitary Eurasian mythology, it is anchored in a universal human experience, ‘the self-image of the body’. Asymmetrical de-ambulation is the privileged signifier of contact with death, because all living beings are symmetrical in form, and among them humans are specifically biped. The impairing of the capacity to walk amounts to putting a ...”

“... clear enough: it is designed to suggest the distance between the Stuart monarchy, conceived as a self-contained household, and the landed class outside it – in other words, its lack of roots in the social soil at large. The unspoken antonym is feudal. This picture of the state is not a quirk but a logical requirement of the claim that the aristocracy was ...”

“... of some of the poet’s manuscripts, The Last and Greatest Art, evidence of Pope’s own endlessly self-correcting and self-refining perfectionism can himself as Pope’s biographer write as he does here. There is in the Sargasso sea of eyewash a real failure to understand that individual, inward apprehension of language ...”

“... bombed PLO buildings in Tunis, killing several dozen civilians: this was termed ‘understandable self-defence’ by the President. It turned out later that Jonathan Pollard, given a life sentence in America in March of this year, had handed over the requisite information about PLO offices to Israel, as part of a spying operation. Here was a weird ...”

“... had generated a ‘schizophrenic personality on the question of race’. There was the self that ‘proudly professed the great principles of democracy, and a self in which she madly practised the antithesis of democracy’. White backlash was ‘nothing new’, merely the ‘resurfacing of old ...”

“... hot weather came and sit up to their necks in ponds; not so the descendants of the industrious, self-mortifying saints who imported the Protestant ethic wholesale into a country intended for the siesta and are proud, proud! of flying in the face of nature. In most latitudes with summers like these, everything slows down, then. You stay all day in penumbra ...”

“... the offices of the New Yorker, be yond the reach of MacArthur’s censors.) An endless string of self-serving interviews with MacArthur portrayed the Occupation a one-man band in which he had single-handedly brought democracy to a people said to be hopelessly addicted to militarism. In private, the correspondents, who knew better, called Japan’s autocratic ...”

“... great and immensely popular – he was apt to address his new friend with an exceptional degree of self-infatuated portentousness. He was already well into Pierre when he wrote to Hawthorne in November 1851, still exhilarated by Hawthorne’s response to Moby-Dick, to whom the book was dedicated: ‘I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb ...”

“... the hills of Sheffield, my pains vanished, my joints springing, swinging my bags of potatoes and self-raising flour as if they were feathers, as if I were self-raised myself, and scattering my careless laughter to the winds. For the time being, though, my spirits had sunk. The drugs seemed to be having an effect, but not ...”

“... that is intolerable, it is the waking up happy.’ Woods goes on: ‘Gay critics made gay writers self-conscious about their sense of appropriate endings. No central gay character could be murdered or commit suicide, even if for reasons clearly represented as being other than homosexuality itself, for fear of enforcing the myth of the tragic queer.’ (A ...”

“... as Soviet citizens and custodians of their cultures, which retained the right to outright self-determination. Phinney acknowledged the necessity of the developmentalism imposed by the US state but pointed out that it was hardly in Indian interests to become proletarians at the same level as the poorest people in the country. ‘The US ...”

“... Her subsequent publications are not obviously driven by any impulse to theological self-definition, though they recurrently strike what might sound like a Unitarian note of principled brightness: McCarthy describes her as having a ‘good-humoured hopefulness’, which seems right. In 1774, against her father’s wishes, she married Rochemont ...”

“... averts its eyes from the past or licks its wounds. Both attitudes translate into paralysing self-consciousness. Once again, the realities on the ground – the ‘Africa of the Africans’ – do not count for much. French public opinion, which with rare exceptions did not object to the neo-colonialism of the trente glorieuses, is once again ...”

“... and since access to the elite means access to wealth, the cycle of elite formation is essentially self-sustaining and closed to outsiders. This is scarcely news. It is known now and it was known 50 years ago, but there has never been a serious will to do anything about it. The year of the Butler Education Act, 1944, also saw the publication of the Fleming ...”

“... Red River qualifies its epic mode by imputing it to Dunson’s – or to Texan, or to American – self-aggrandisement. The ending aside, the film achieves an epic grandeur unsurpassed among Westerns. Red River is a capitalist epic. The railroad, which in populist Westerns is usually the enemy, the corporation dispossessing the farmers, is in Red River a ...”