“... the ranks at the back were increasingly happy and those at the front, pace Hirsch and other self-described but resentful realists, were not very visibly disaffected. (In the Sixties, in some research that was published with the Institute, W.G. Runciman had found that the English had always made very narrow social and economic comparisons.) Young did not ...”

“... was one bloke here for a couple of days who had come specifically to give us a workshop on self-control. Well he just couldn’t take it – he bashed into this cauldron of boiling water, almost spilling it over one of the women, and then he just stormed off.’ There does, however, seem still to be a real difficulty, compounded by the fact that the ...”

“... the ‘Times’ is a remarkably bland book, less critical and more comforting to the old thing’s self-esteem than the official history (edited by Stanley Morrison). Too briefly treated is the story of the paper’s virile early days, when the Controller used to send a retired Irish officer round to the homes of gentlemen with erring wives with the threat ...”

“... death of the first child, born prematurely when its mother fell downstairs, produced an orgy of self-pity in Loti’s journals. ‘This little model of myself who would have had my thoughts, my problems, my agonies, and who was already turning to dust, the dust of eternity ...’ Not much thought there for the unfortunate mother, who was later to be ...”

“... sophistication and agility than most Hardy critics are capable of, would begin from the surely self-evident proposition that great poets don’t have to be good men; that Hardy may have been, as it seems he was, a lousy husband, but that he may have been a great poet all the same. For this defence to work, it has to be shown that Hardy’s lack of ...”

“... of the novels at various stages in their writing. Mr Williams also has a more general, and oddly self-defeating, argument. He proposes as evidence of this collaboration the badness of the result: for example, the ‘tedium’ of Daniel Deronda reflects Lewes’s influence. It hardly needs to be pointed out that this is a very treacherous way of claiming ...”

“... for Franco; that he had fought in the Second World War. Alexander generously tolerates these self-improvements by describing Campbell as a ‘great myth-maker’. But he wasn’t that. His yarns don’t add up to a myth: he was simply a great liar. It’s all part of the Byronic role: but let’s not make even a poet’s lies virtuous by calling them ...”

“... a rebuke to liberalism’s recent retreat ‘into a deadening private and individual care for the self’. Religious intensity is not new, then, to American politics. But the present convergence of politics and religion is, Colombo believes, unprecedented and deeply alarming. Although the new Christian Right began gathering strength shortly after World War ...”

“... fantasy, the fetishism, the group-sex, the masturbation (mutual and solo – or sola), the self-mutilation, the incessant oozings and ejaculations and enemas and even, occasionally, some relatively straightforward coitus – are likely to have a distinct feeling of ‘Here we go again’ when on the first page of the first section of The White Hotel ...”

“... went for soft options and easy answers during what were long sad years of decline. Inflation is a self-inflicted wound: successive governments caused it by trying to do too much too quickly by way of deficit financing. Grossly excessive government expenditure is the main cause of inflation. In other words, inflation is politically-induced and caused by ...”

“... not the substance. If an entire intake of ordinands is shrilly homosexual, if a famous Dean is a self-publicising opportunist, the revelation is made to seem good for a giggle. The occasional flash of ‘serious’ comment seems out of place: ‘This new Mass ... made a cult of ugliness and banality. Its appalling phrases emphasised nothing but the confusion ...”

“... book is full of her pathetic letters home, and of her complaints against her father’s fierce self-righteousness. And then: Dad turned up one night on my doorstep, really far gone in his cups. He could hardly stand up, he was so bloody squiffy. I let him in, and I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Dad, what are you doing in London this late?’ It was after ...”

“... pathologically ashamed was but the return to roost of fledglings hatched in the nest of Jewish self-assertion: ‘the very notion of being chosen by such a God will produce the retribution appropriate to it.’ Yahweh is the projection of Israel’s desire to be above other nations. Election, the chosen people, the choosing God – all are the fantasy of a ...”

“... us of one of the permanent psychological wounds left by the loss of the language: a habit of self-castigation which can easily become shame, a sense of inferiority which can easily become submission. It was out of shame and submission that the language revival grew, defending its newly acquired vigour in an exclusive, often bitter spirit, always ...”

“... strong that it attracts ‘right-wing’ members – the naturally authoritative, antiprogressive, self-seeking and smug, the sort who would join the Tories if they lived in ‘a safe Conservative seat’. But Darlington is not like that at all. The Labour Movement is still paternal, the Big Daddy of the town, usually (but not always) in command of the Borough ...”