“... or untruthfully, I can’t always judge, but more informatively than they are used to and more self-servingly than he should have. There are those, too, who say that it is inappropriate to receive a pension from the KGB and then spill its beans and those who believe that in speaking of the past one should respect the traditions of the past; that one should ...”

“... parties and, through force of personality, committed it to a succession of moral campaigns. The self-righteousness, authoritarian populism, obsession with ‘crusader politics’, lack of consideration for the feelings of Cabinet colleagues – all these traits can be found in both prime ministers. No doubt those in the know will also have noticed something ...”

“... smoke, but would instead fatten the worms which feed the birds which keep the London cats sleek, self-satisfied and asleep for 18 hours a day. While the other Jenny went off to spend the holiday weekend in Bradford (which gave more pause for thought about spending eternity in such eccentric company), I hunkered down with my Gazetteer to apprise myself of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her around. Thinking about herself, and her family life, past and present, produces a kind of self-congratulatory, fake amazement at the things required of her: ‘How has Eleanor stayed alive for so long?’ It’s unfair, of course, to implicate the author in the foibles of her character; but Susan Schaeffer doesn’t adopt any of the usual devices ...”

“... to withstand what they would consider ill-informed prejudice. In Britain we have no such self-confident cadre. Furthermore, it is difficult to be a friend of the nuclear industry. The easy arguments are all stacked in the hands of those who are against nuclear power. To argue convincingly for nuclear power requires some knowledge of engineering and ...”

“... immediately sized him up in 1940 as ‘one of the most objectionable people I had ever met: noisy, self-assertive, whining, and frankly unpleasant’. In 1956, when Colville formed a lunch club with John Junor of the Sunday Express, one of the rules was that Randolph Churchill should under no circumstances be admitted. Perhaps Randolph improved with age. I ...”

“... weak and friendless to resist her. This was success of a sort, though hardly the triumph of the self-confident autocracy so admired by Miss Behrens. It may well have been enough to convince the educated classes of Prussia that they lived under a system that worked; that they were part, indeed, of such a system, since the vast majority of them seem to have ...”

“... selected, edited and juxtaposed around a theme. But they are not enhanced, and they are not given self-conscious substance by any 20th-century trickery. It works well. The narrative skims along with an extraordinary lightness, thanks partly to a swift editing and pointing of the significant matter but also to Vizinczey’s impatience with clutter. He has ...”

“... prominence has redirected scholarship to the history of the subject. Noting, with the authority of self-evidence, that from the Roman Empire to the Common Market Western Europe (and he might have added North America) owes its civilisation to translators, Louis Kelly sets out to investigate the history of the art from both a theoretic and a pragmatic ...”

“... did A.A. Milne intend it to be funny ha ha: he was paying tribute to the child’s extraordinary self-absorption and egocentricity. For me it was all far too near the recurrent dread that one’s mother might disappear one day and never come back; that one would come back from school and find an empty house, or worse still, no house at all. Disaster is ...”

“... are between these. A book is not just a lot of words on one subject: it should aspire to a certain self-containedness. These pieces do not take up one another’s loose ends: even juxtaposed, they retain the characteristic feel of articles. Of course this question of genre need not matter much, even if we do make sense of it. Good journal articles are probably ...”

“... Eton means nothing in this context. Both men have been for most of their lives rich, confident and self-assured. Neither belongs to the aristocracy, though Mr Macmillan married into it. And what does ‘aristocracy’ really mean in a world of endless absorption and assimilation? All this chip-on-the-shoulder fussication about social class, exploited ...”

“... early twenties he developed a powerful technical apparatus; he liked to boast of being virtually self-taught in Greek, but Grafton shows that he learned much about textual criticism from Turnebus and Auratus and, later, much about the systematic reconstruction of archetypes and lost works from the great jurist Cujacius. At 24 he published valuable ...”

“... at levels which leave plant and workers idle. Yet this is indeed an equilibrium – there is no self-righting tendency, actual or thwarted, towards full capacity. This is the practical implication of the theory of effective demand, but there is also a theoretical implication. For what role is now left for interest rate? No longer the arbiter of supply and ...”