“... of the Reformation in London (and elsewhere) consist of the story of a sectarian remnant, the self-defining community of the godly, or is it the history of the all-comprehending parochial majority, the national and civic Church which Reformation legislation rendered formally Protestant? The answer must be that it was both, that the Reformation forged a ...”

“... the islanders were trapped in their remote home, unable to escape the consequences of their self-inflicted environmental collapse. Ponting warns that the same thing could happen to us. Living conditions deteriorated on Easter Island. Crop yields declined. People died off. In 1722, the Europeans found, not a sophisticated society of 7000 people, but a ...”

“... is of them in the streets, and have managed to make professional football look like a miracle of ...”

“... of God’. Both, presumably, were also men of themselves, Fisher as slightly fussy and self-important, Ramsey in the more engaging way of following his own devices, appearing unconcerned about his many oddities and, to an extent unusual in high office, keeping silent when he felt like it. After Repton Ramsey went to Magdalene College, Cambridge ...”

“... deserting her husband during Katherine’s childhood: now she provides the funds for Katherine, self-exiled in Spain, one ‘bolter’ subsidising another. The old lady takes Katherine for a holiday in Portugal: the mother seems very conscious of herself as being a lady among the locals, a settler among the natives. She had been somewhat ...”

“... count because there wasn’t enough action from below or blood in the streets, or there wasn’t a self-conscious revolutionary vanguard which plotted and led the masses towards a chosen destination. Still, I don’t meet anybody who doubts that these are the greatest changes of our lives: the end of the war that has lasted since before most of us can ...”

“... with an exemplary scrupulousness. Hill regards style as, above all, a moral struggle. The intense self-consciousness about meaning that this view produces can make his own style something of a struggle for the reader, but it should be said that in this new volume the occasions when obliquity tips over into opacity are rarer than in some of the essays ...”

“... Now he is being courted again by James Baker, as perhaps the only person who can square the self-imposed American circle whereby the Palestinians pick a non-PLO delegation. And a White Paper has been issued in which the Jordanian position on the war (no foreign troops, a regional solution, the concept of linkage) is recalled with pride. Perhaps nowhere ...”

“... in abundance. Despite the manifest fact that Anita Hill was also black and just as impressively self-made as Thomas, the Democrats allowed themselves to be skewered by the absurd Republican contention that questioning Thomas’s behaviour was tantamount to ‘hightech lynching’. Manoeuvred into a corner, they failed both to defend Professor Hill ...”

“... physical causal roles of such states. On the other hand, there are those who stoutly declare it as self-evident that no amount of physical information about the brain could ever imply the possession of a state of consciousness, so that conscious experience falls radically outside the domain of physical science. This dispute has recently centred on the question ...”

“... midsummer nightmare dissolved into a midsummer night’s dream again. All this is summed up in the self-consciously literary opening paragraph of The Magic Toyshop (1967): ‘The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land.’ Which reminds us – and this may also be reflected in Angela ...”

“... which were to host the ‘West as America’ show, have withdrawn their invitations. Lynne Cheney, self-styled Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has become a heroine to the Hurrah-for-Columbus forces by denying a grant to 1492: Clash of Visions, a documentary depicting Columbus in unflattering terms. Cheney said the film dwelt too heavily ...”

“... making of the British economy. Just after the takeover had happened, I ran into Bob Gavron, the self-styled Thatcherite Socialist who heads the very successful St Ives printing group. He asked me what had really happened. When I told him, his comment was ‘I give you eighteen months before you’ll have convinced yourself that you planned it all.’ But I ...”

“... If we are accustomed to modern philosophy books we may even find it absurdly pretentious and self-conscious. Why doesn’t Burnyeat just tell us what he thinks? Why doesn’t Plato have Socrates just tell Theaetetus what he thinks? The reason is that here the dialogue’s form is most appropriate to its subject, which is perhaps why in this dialogue ...”

“... hymns in alternate lines (gallery v. floor, under-forties v. over-forties), and ‘pretending self-indulgently that if Christ was not risen from the dead they would go home and put their heads in the gas oven’. Their capers, as Max Wright calls them, made him feel a bit faint; and made me feel that Edmund Gosse did not know his luck. But on second ...”