“... ministerial years, he was often too busy for books), and his impatience and lack of intellectual self-confidence sometimes show in these pieces, with their repetitions and broad-brush passages. Short sections providing sudden insights, provocative suggestions or increases in rhetorical pressure show him at his best. Midway through a long contribution to a ...”

“... had characterised the organisation’s activism, winning it grudging admiration, degenerated into self-indulgence and sloganeering. Weeks after Lewis lost the vote, Carmichael electrified racial politics with a call and response routine in Greenwood, Mississippi in which he and his African American audience took turns in shouting ‘Black Power’. He thereby ...”

“... the course of his life, he extensively documented his thousands of sexual encounters in a self-declared Stud File … He even tattooed a handy series of measurement marks on his forearm in order to accurately record the particular prowess of each of his partners for posterity … ‘I wanted freedom,’ he described later. ‘[Tattooing] was a grand ...”

“... of Irish labourers. The policy reflected a moral belief that aid should promote self-reliance and distinguish the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ poor. As Trevelyan explained, ‘Our plan is not to give the meal away, but to sell it.’By March 1847 public works schemes employed more than 700,000 people, whose wages supported ...”

“... for this, as I suggested in the LRB at the time (23 February 2012), was at best weak and at worst self-defeating. After six years as a judge – and, going by some of his judgments, a good judge too – he has returned to the theme of the deference owed by law to politics. It is his bad luck to have done so at a moment when the UK’s political process, both ...”

“... East is seen as perfectly reasonable. Often the very people who think it a sin to tamper with the self-expression of the markets are the first to call for lower immigration from poorer countries, though in all probability, it would take decades of inward migration to bring about the degree of ‘cultural difference’ that a bad patch of international ...”

“... she might fancy. This commission caused him some anxiety. Well-read up to a point, he was largely self-taught, his reading tending to be determined by whether an author was gay or not. Fairly wide remit though this was, it did narrow things down a bit, particularly when choosing a book for someone else, and the more so when that someone else happened to be ...”

“... could not have been ruled both gently and effectively. Stephen Greenblatt, who, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, writes so memorably on More and Wyatt, impairs his case by too easily calling Henry VIII a Stalin, for the ambitions and resources of 20th-century tyranny were beyond the imagination of Tudor England. Protesting writers were not alienated ...”

“... Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, a voluntary body forming part of the City of London’s means of self-regulation. The power to review the exercise of the Royal Prerogative was established as early as 1967, when the Crown challenged the right of the High Court to entertain a dispute about whether the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board had acted in ...”

“... capitalist as long as he does not also give away his fortune and inheritance rights. Nor does the self-proletarianised student turn into a worker by virtue of the fact that he or she could do better by becoming, say, a self-employed doctor or lawyer. This feature of the definition makes good sociological sense. We want the ...”

“... is, after all, nothing to prevent a male reader from discovering those same signs of strain and self-division in the Freudian text. To this extent theory would seem to occupy a gender-neutral ground, being neither (as Daly would have it) an instrument of male repression nor, on the other hand, a weapon of value only to women readers. All the same, one may ...”

“... these relationships,’ Skidelsky suggests, ‘may be found a clue to Mosley’s supreme self-esteem.’ He didn’t do well at school or at Sandhurst; nor did he distinguish himself during the war. Although he did the élite thing in volunteering for the Royal Flying Corps, he won no medals – a matter of some regret for a man who passionately ...”

“... the conceptual confusion and intellectual timidity of most of it. There is a strong impression of self-censorship: the most fundamental questions about the future organisation of society are taboo, as if to evoke the possibility of change were to preclude it. An important factor here is the traditional antagonism between Marxism and Catholicism which I shall ...”

“... Protestant piece of writing: there is the assertion of uncompromising principle, a strong self-justifying theme which runs throughout the sermon, an affirmation of the work ethic (that brutal verb ‘to business’, echoing the anti-Home Rule slogan, ‘Ulster means business’), and finally there is the idea of being born again. Imaginatively, this ...”

“... biographer would have weighed such dubious memorial evidence against Frost’s (possibly self-serving) account that he had left college because he was bored; and a scrupulous biographer would have recognised, in support of Frost’s version, that he also left Harvard (in good standing) without finishing. But scrupulousness is not Meyers’s long ...”