“... be at war with ‘moderns’ of the Sixties. He appears unaware that the word ‘modern’ is not self-applied in these Post-Modern times. ‘Modern’ sounds old-fashioned, a reference to literature written through the period from the 1890s to World War Two. Davie’s targets have been moving around when he wasn’t looking. There are some puzzling ...”

“... ethnicity, about tolerance and vulnerability, about chains of command, about popular languages of self-respect and identity. Marpingen offers in microcosm an image of the political forces at work in a developing nationalist state. Blackbourn tackles his Marpingers from every angle: personal, demographic, social, political, economic. Though not quite a ...”

“... to roll in wealth. In Saudi Arabia, unlike almost anywhere else in the world, the most complete self-indulgence on the part of certain of the rulers co-exists with the most severe moral order, imposed by the Wahhabi religious police. The old King always regarded the oil revenue as money to be used by him as a source of munificence and the new King Saud even ...”

“... him in a remark about Loyalist ‘operators’. In The Edge of the Union, Steve Bruce, the self-styled ‘Prods are me’ spokesman of academe, observes that ‘paramilitaries use the term “operators” to distinguish those members who have been or are prepared to be personally involved in illegal violence from the “backroom boys”, “armchair ...”

“... can provide an implicit but ironically continuous contrast between the ‘diverse and undulant’ self-discoveries of his individuality and the impersonal needs and importunities of the flesh. There was something comic about five Booker judges discussing the book’s felicities, and its possible moments of failure, without ever really getting around to what ...”

“... function is, along with the columns of agony aunts and psychoanalysis, an aspect of social self-regulation. Middling kinds of person suffering from middling strokes of good and bad fortune are observed as they normalise their condition, or blamed or pitied or sympathised with for failing to do so. Leonora Carrington, on the other hand, writes of ...”

“... life into the work by actively exploring, not avoiding, the complex problems that Wordsworth’s self-account presents to his biographer. This does not mean that Gill attempts to square Wordsworth’s interpretations of his own life with each other and with the datable facts – an enterprise which would, he admits, lead only to confusion. His achievement is ...”

“... opinion could be turbulent, foolish and destructive, and that reason was the slave of passion and self-interest, but instead of dismissing it, he sought instead to tame it and domesticate it by a renovation of manners. History was to help house-train. Increasingly, after his early, dazzling philosophical works of the 1740s he turned his attention from a study ...”

“... voted him in. In Venezuela, Perez is taking a similar line against his own once-comfortable and self-serving supporters. In Mexico, Salinas has seen the red light in the international institutions and in his own reduced votes, and is trying to reduce the power of the corporate bodies, both business and union, which his party has been serving since the late ...”

“... visits by the Prime Minister. I find myself thinking, it would be Liverpool, that sentimental, self-dramatising place, and am brought up short by seeing footage of a child brought out dead, women waiting blank-faced at Lime Street, and a father meeting his two sons off the train, his relief turned to anger at the sight of their smiling faces, cuffing and ...”

“... parents. But the longest and most distinguished story in Words of Love avoids both sourness and self-pity. ‘Spring Sonata’ records the life of Arthur Hallett, a 96-year-old violinist living alone on the coast of Suffolk. In this story Philip Norman enlarges upon the idea of music as a redemptive force in a soiled world. Hallett is ...”

“... Should one try to sympathise with this frenetic, unstoppable, ambitious, arrogant, élitist, un-self-conscious, radical, enthusiastic, honourable, priggish, yet undeniably engaging young man, or object to him? If you identify with him, accept him as a likeable and basically commendable person, which is the natural temptation in a book as agreeably written ...”

“... his work. Her broodings on Dante are of the same order. Her many volumes of memoirs are shallow, self-centred, capricious and repetitive. Ocampo’s true vocation, and no doubt one at which she would have excelled, was the stage. Her parents frustrated her acting career, and Victoria the writer grew up a poor substitute. It does not necessarily follow that ...”

“... at crowd-control – at preventing a clash between rival fans – invalidated through lack of self-control. One of those struck in the incident struck back: ‘The only one who was a hooligan was Brian Clough.’ Clough’s chairman defended his action with an image which rang bells for René and me: ‘Fans know that it is wrong to come on to the ...”

“... stage with the discussion of such themes as ‘the sovereignty of opinion’ and ‘autonomy and self-realisation’. There are some puzzling points here: for instance, a reference to Mill’s having been influenced ‘in later years, with a frisson of unease, by the Comtist conception of the priesthood of science’. Punctuation is part of the problem: but ...”