“... with Dickens and, his favourite, Sheridan Le Fanu. The article ends in a characteristically self-deprecating but also unusually abrupt way: ‘There need not be any peroration to a series of rather disjointed reflections. I will only ask the reader to believe that, though I have not hitherto mentioned it, I have read The Turn of the Screw.’ Deafening ...”

“... of the uncanny was to haunt a violent century in which emphatic distinctions would be made between self and others, friends and enemies, compatriots and strangers. When the familiar and the unfamiliar can’t be clearly distinguished, thrones and altars start to tremble. Who is my friend and who is not? What are the duties or practical implications of ...”

“... this means that Iraqis secretly don’t want the occupation forces to leave at all. This kind of self-deception leads to American commentators speaking of the extent and timing of US troop withdrawal as if it were purely an American decision, to be decided by the outcome of the presidential election. One of the few US commentators to have an understanding of ...”

“... The problem​ with being a dedicated social trouble-maker who has not self-destructed is that, as the decades roll by, the society you wish to irritate gets used to you and even begins to regard you with a certain affection. Eventually, you become a beloved puppy that is always forgiven for soiling the carpet. No matter what taboos you kick out at, people just smile and shake their head ...”

“... Down, died in 1962 of plague caught at work. Plague in the 21st century is a shadow of its former self. As a pandemic threat it has been replaced by influenza (which needs neither rats nor fleas) and as a microbial killer by HIV (which needs only unprotected sex). It is much more of a threat to prairie dogs than to people, and is in essence a rarity, with ...”

“... to lay down general rules which then acquired almost divine force. The boycott organisers insisted self-righteously that they were not using the boycott for party-political ends: they wanted sporting merit, not race, to count. ‘When people branded me as a Communist puppet, I stayed focused on apartheid in sport,’ Sam Ramsamy, boss of the National Olympic ...”

“... and reasoned reflection, rather than only by financial incentives (acting merely as ‘self-interested rational actors’): ‘One by one, then, the signposts to sustainability are being erected; and I regard ecological citizenship as a key addition to the collection.’This sense of ecological responsibility is part of a new trend which straddles ...”

“... of such forces and resources as he had at his disposal. He distrusted the departmental self-interest of professional civil servants, and in any case they took too long to do things. The Prof and his team of young economists and statisticians had powers to override departmental norms, to extract instantly the information they wanted, and – which ...”

“... and realism, that makes musicals so American, and so gay. He regrets that musicals, in their self-importance, have tried to take on the great themes and dramatic consistency of ‘straight’ drama, whereas drama has shown little interest in taking on the more fluid structure of the musical. The gay content and gay participation in musicals is a barrier ...”

“... When he called himself a radical, it was not insincere, and many of his instincts set him against self-sustaining structures of power and authority. ‘Let us bust open the patronage and privilege by which both Socialists and Tories manipulate our politics and maintain their rigid out-of-date party structure,’ he declared in 1958. He believed in a ...”

“... Commissioners. (To say that they appear an obscure bunch, whose qualifications are far from self-explanatory, would be an understatement.) This means that the reader is deprived of information essential to judging the value of these reports. One example will suffice. It has been known for at least thirty years that two of the principal witnesses before ...”

“... to belief in gods and spirits with loyalty to seemingly unrelated national, ethnic or other self-differentiated coalitions in such a way as to generate what is currently termed ‘fundamentalism’. But what about refuseniks like Scaradino, or like Diagoras of Melos who, when shown the votive offerings in the temple of Poseidon at Samothrace, which had ...”

“... resolution authorising the war on terrorism, preferring instead to rely on an extended claim of self-defence. It has forged new alliances with illiberal regimes in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, reversing years of effort to promote human rights. In an age of increasing interdependence and co-operation, Bush and his advisers are ...”

“... she hides what she knows, like everyone else in the novel. Bad servants, like the irrepressibly self-interested Afy (short for Aphrodite) Hallijohn, imitate their employers; inadequate employers might end up as servants themselves. The categories shift and waver even as Wood insists on their fixity. Socially mobile Victorians, dogged by ...”

“... in his choice of what to study: pea plants are easy to raise and can be both out-crossed or self-fertilised, and he chose to study only characters – wrinkled v. round peas, for example – that are discrete and not likely to grade into each other. But he was lucky as well. When looking at pairs of characters – wrinkled/round and yellow/green, for ...”