“... societies of Cambridge and even of Oxford are in danger of being seen by the outside world as self-complacent and claustrophobic in their concern with small precedences and promotions. Hugh Carey is well aware that the small beer of Cambridge is not necessarily champagne to the outside world. His biography is not of the suffocating kind. Forbes’s ...”

“... talk about in the late Seventies, but an insufficient growth of effective demand, and this was a self-inflicted wound. Sterling was overvalued, and if it was not to be devalued – and Wilson was almost pathologically determined that it should not be – then the balance of payments could only be kept on an even keel by the fall in imports, and gain in ...”

“... more reckless gambling.’ But indulgence in house-building was a particularly tempting form of self-assertion in expenditure. The builder could always claim, unless his mania ended in bankruptcy, that he had done it all for the benefit of future generations. One after another the separate items – side pavilions, stable block, terraces, kitchen ...”

“... certain lines, but the existence of earlier and later versions of a poem proves nothing about the self-consciousness of the poet’s technique; it suggests only that the poet looked at what he had written and was dissatisfied. Ricks is not a Mediaevalist and he is careful to make a respectful gesture towards those of his colleagues who are. With Marvell and ...”

“... melting-pot image is the best we can do.’ However, this accords to language matters a self-conscious and artificial attention which is not at all compatible with the almost organic course of language. A great deal of rubbish has been written about the melting-pot, which has been represented as a conspiratorial attempt at forcible assimilation. For ...”

“... brats’ or ‘air force brats’. There were times when we were ‘colonial brats’. Lazy, self-regarding, pleasure-seeking and utterly incurious about the country we were living in. That all changed with the Biafran War. I well remember the day of the military coup that precipitated the country into its civil war. I was due to fly back to Britain for ...”

“... by men in the community to stand up for themselves verbally when they are teased and to develop a self-protective repartee of jokes and playful insults. Little girls, who are often described as less bright by adults (though not, significantly, by their teachers), are more likely to learn to talk with older girls and as part of games and play, organised ...”

“... revealing: both men seem to have put down their dreams straightforwardly and with the minimum of self-conscious fuss, while Ruskin is especially impressive, recording his nightmares, many of them horrible, with a stoical grace that touches the heart. Even when Ruskin has a rare pleasant dream, the account of it is suffused with his authentic ...”

“... tall hostess in Hollywood, of Hungarian extraction, who will fling her arms wide in infectious self-enthusiasm and say: ‘I am a woman of impulse. When I am hungry, I eat. When I am tired, I sleep.’ It is unfair to speak of Zandra Rhodes’s text, but the photographs of her designs are worlds away from working lives. I remember that, when I was 17, I ...”

“... much a figure of tragedy as Tolstoy’s wife. A recurring theme emerges from this biography. The self-sufficient Solzhenitsyn needs people, but he can easily discard them. For example, he accepted the Nobel Prize not merely as a personal honour but as a powerful political lever to be used with maximum effect even if it caused embarrassment to those who had ...”

“... by pressure groups of equal ineptitude trying to nag him into acts of censorship or pledges of self-censorship. The assaults are displacement activities. Writers and editors are considered soft targets and they are attacked because the real targets refuse to give way. When 51 per cent of the chairmanships of banks, industries and cabinet committees are ...”

“... satisfy their curiosity: a sense of mystery pervades all her work. In the letters we discover her self-confessed longing for greatness – a yearning which could not be quelled, to the extent that she considered it her ‘demon’. We note a weakness for titles amounting to snobbery – her enjoyment of the aristocratic set and her pleasure at being addressed ...”

“... pages which are immediately followed by a full-length portrait of L. P. Hartley: diffident and self-deprecating, victimised by servants, a great weekender at country houses, the hero of a long vendetta with the swans of the Bradford Avon. W. H. Auden, in schoolmasterly vein, minutely regiments a marriage ceremony of the praiseworthy sort he had himself ...”

“... by following rules that are simple, clear and learnable, and that do not permit much scope for self-deception. Hare also thinks they shouldn’t make excessively heavy demands on our motives – a curious point to which I shall return. Hare says that many of the most popular arguments against utilitarianism – those which claim it would require some ...”

“... represented among those who have actual power over the lives of others. To see how self-evident this is, one has only to think of any alien racist society. There are, for example, whites in South Africa who detest Apartheid and the oppression of black people: but one would not expect to find any among the police or the politicians or any other ...”