“... here by Henry Parkes, who argues that the tradition of humble anonymity was derived from a self-deprecating desire not to upstage Gregory. It was only after many centuries that a personality as argumentative as Abelard’s finally made no attempt to conceal his name. Both he and Hildegard were pursued by exceptional fame in their lifetimes, which ...”

“... to break the law in this instance? I felt her disappointment, as I saw it, tarnishing my heroic self-image. Twenty-two years later, I’m still not sure whether it was the right thing to do, although history has at least shown that my anger was justified. One thing I do know, though: it wasn’t terrorism.Three weeks after the protest, my mother, who had ...”

“... small part in criminal justice, they nevertheless represent and embody it. Professional judges and self-selected magistrates will not command the same respect and legitimacy. Judges used to be venerated, but now they are vilified. Imagine if a judge-only trial of an alleged prolific sex-offender or child killer resulted in an acquittal. ‘Enemies of the ...”

“... prospectus, or will it mean whatever the US decides best serves its purposes? There is something self-indulgent about all these declarations of new eras and pages turned. A sense, perhaps, that the British state is chasing apparitions. The stream of definitive strategic documents never ends. The government will soon publish another National Security ...”

“... the Strong’. When it came to political and military matters, however, Augustus’s appetite for self-advertisement had predictably unhappy consequences. Only three years after succeeding his brother as elector of Saxony in 1694, he bid for and won the crown of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. For the rest of his life, he would struggle to keep hold ...”

“... violent hatred of the other, false nostalgia for stolen pasts, the isolated pursuit of self-advantage. What does Reeves lose by not being bolder? She is constrained by her own fiscal rules and Starmer’s fragility. It’s true that she is in a tougher spot than many of her predecessors. She can’t borrow at zero cost, an opportunity squandered ...”

“... Or (as F.M.L. Thompson suggests) were the relationships and interactions less positive, less self-aware? The Victorian countryside did hang together: this book does not, or rather does not explain how it did. This is not a tidy conclusion, but then the Victorian countryside is not a tidy subject. As with most worlds we have lost, its rediscovery is a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... described above, was a South African; so, more importantly, was Harry Morris, the effective and self-important advocate who secured Broughton’s acquittal. All this helped to make the case quite as big an event in the South Africa of my childhood as it must have been back ‘home’ in Britain. I can just remember seeing the headlines and pictures in the ...”

“... stages becomes, on a rising scale, a form, not only of production, but of destruction and self-destruction. It is true that the major phase of this long history has been the specific combination of capitalist drives for profit and ever more powerful technologies of transformation. But this cannot reduce the argument to one against the property forms ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... grateful for the reason and the subtlety. They are not qualities that abound, and the price of a self-regard as high as Vidal’s must be a temptation to see all your wisecracks as ...”

“... 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 ...”