“... together with ‘a great book against Christianity’; but they never came to anything. The same self-knowledge may have lain behind the frustration of many of her other bold plans: to found ‘an association of literary men and artists’ to study the Ottoman lands; to find hidden cities and buried treasure; to make ‘sublime and philosophical ...”

“... agitation by a handful of Islamists or Communists, meant that they were likely to be blindsided by self-consciously political protest. Again and again they were caught off-guard in gauging the depth of the resentment felt by their Arab subjects or the scale of the protests they were capable of mounting. Having mastered an enormous mass of disconnected archival ...”

“... for DVDs, and chat to each other electronically rather than go to a bar. In an increasingly self-centred society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading. This is not to say that the book is doomed. But publishers will surely have to change the way they do ...”

“... sense it represented a rearguard local engagement between arts intellectuals and Cambridge’s self-confident natural scientists, well on the way to their 83 Nobel prizes, who knew that the future greatness (and funding) of the university would essentially be in their hands. Probably nothing irritated arts dons more than the scientists’ certainty that ...”

“... arrives: Margaret Thatcher, apparently a regular visitor to the park, now a ghost of her former self. The ‘heightened reality of the “Iron Lady”, scourge of the trade unions, victor of the Falklands War, the best man in the cabinet’ has dissipated. She totters through the park, steadied by an agency nurse, wearing ‘old ladies’ clothes’ and ...”

“... Third Republic propaganda urged people to get to know France, and the cause of national self-promotion was supported by local historians, new institutions such as the Club Alpin Français, and by children’s books such as Augustine Bruno’s Le Tour de France par deux enfants. For their part, the provincials were supposed to express patriotism by ...”

“... in all kinds of public circumstances, but then small children don’t make the distinction between self and other that prevents them from chatting to themselves in a room full of people and make-believing in full view of friends and strangers. I keep all that sort of thing strictly private – it’s the way of the adult – or try to, and although I do ...”

“... The streets are laden with lovely feasts, and the singing of boys rises like a flame. The poem is self-reflexive: a chorus of young men sing about how, in times of peace, choruses sing in praise of the gods. Bacchylides thus suggests that the performance of his poem is itself a sign of peace. One common criticism of Bacchylides is that he is too ...”

“... it is suggested, could sing the way they did only as a result of intense personal suffering and self-destructive behaviour, preferably based on underlying ineradicable mental disturbance and race or gender oppression. What would be the point of a great woman singer who led a perfectly undramatic life: how could such a creature be? It’s true that Kiri Te ...”

“... not to let that stand in his way. He does, after all, have the Hand of God on his side. The self-importance of the Fifa high-ups is perhaps best gauged by the fact that its head, Sepp Blatter, is allowed to move through airports with no need to show a passport or for any of the usual customs and immigration procedures, a privilege he shares only with ...”

“... his friendless sojourn in England is not dispelled by his sexual enterprises, described in chill, self-deprecating detail. He is far from finding for himself the style of life he thinks appropriate to an artist – a style coldly impassioned, licentious and creative. On the contrary, he is ‘afraid of writing, afraid of women’. At the end of Youth he is ...”

“... listening – might simply mean that life as we know it is rare, not that civilisations inevitably self-destruct in nuclear holocaust. Where Cocconi and Morrison assumed that intelligent civilisations would inevitably pursue scientific investigations, Davies counters that science is not universal, even here on earth. Moreover, the idea, common in the 1950s and ...”

“... for turning the new policy into practice. For while nationality had not usually been a means of self-identification in the region until well into the 20th century, the Bolshevik leaders saw its development as politically necessary: the only means by which ‘real’ class tension could be exposed and overcome. The national-territorial delimitation of ...”

“... in The Waves. Her ‘adhesion’ to the fluid, changeful, venturesome world below has generated a self-assurance bordering on complacency. ‘Therefore I will powder my face and redden my lips. I will make the angle of my eyebrows sharper than usual. I will rise to the surface, standing erect with the others in Piccadilly Circus.’ For Welsh, underground ...”

“... works”’. The question was not ‘what works?’ but ‘what works for us?’ And that self-interest on the part of multiple constituencies was precisely what made democracy work as a whole. Mair’s most original argument is that the decline of parties, of party government, and hence of party democracy as a whole can’t be blamed on either the ...”