“... which incorporated some new elements, including a softer international line and the idea of ‘self-financing’ for business enterprises. Otherwise, the ‘New Edition’ – still, as of now, the official Party programme – is as rigidly correct as the slow-motion goosestep of the KGB guards on their way to and from guard duty at Lenin’s tomb in Red ...”

“... adds a twist: ‘teaching the cultural text requires a university aware of the history of its own self divisions.’ We need to teach not just the book, but also how we come to be teaching the book, how the teacher came to be a teacher, how the student came to be a student, how the room-cleaner who cleaned the blackboard that morning came to be neither a ...”

“... let alone to act on it.’ He is a private man, his excellence, perhaps genius, well hidden by self-containment. Vic does act on the Great World, and becomes a player in the Australian post-war mining and property boom. As he lies dying he thinks back to his childhood: He was in his own nine-year-old body again, standing barefoot in old serge pants and ...”

“... St Peter’s, although he had not been responsible for most of the rebuilding. Alexander VII’s self-advertisement appears rather less blatant, but this was due less to his natural diplomacy than to the accident of his dying before he could have the Pantheon redecorated, with his name around the rim of the oculus. He allowed himself to be represented as a ...”

“... residents. It was the Comrades – young men now patrolling the war-torn streets of Soweto in self-styled citizen’s defence units – who took on the Jackrollers in June and July. Three big Jackrollers were killed in those months and shortly afterwards a vigil for one of the dead men was attacked by the Comrades with an AK47 and a shotgun. The avengers ...”

“... archive to create a series of vivid snapshots, with no attempt at totality. The book was self-consciously a collection of independent essays of a provisional nature. By exploring in detail the world of one clandestine bookseller in one French town, Darnton aimed to show, for instance, how a whole arm of the literary underground operated. These ...”

“... both in 1704 and today. One sees international commerce ‘as a mutual exchange of (eminently self-interested) benefits that enhances the long-term interests of all participants and that is in its essence a true system of natural liberty’. The other ‘sees it instead as a tense and unsteady field of force, constructed and sustained in every instance by ...”

“... Nor was Kennedy’s handling of the crisis initially as sure-footed and commanding as the self-serving and misleading account by his brother Robert suggests. Kennedy’s dramatic televised announcement of the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba was ‘designed to divert attention from his private belief (and that of Defence Secretary Robert ...”

“... The Wind in the Willows is a masterpiece because it really does create a new world, a serious self-contained place, whereas Pooh and Christopher Robin and Milne’s version of Toad are seen and manipulated by the grown-ups. The real Christopher Robin, known to his father as ‘Billy Moon’, had to take the role of the child obliging his parent by always ...”

“... distinctly unreal ... His nose was large and prominent. His eyes ... added to the appearance of self-parody. With a slightly pathetic expression on his face ... he seemed a caricature of the man he once was. What puzzles Taylor is that so many women were willing to ‘leap into his bed’. Walter Duranty was a complex man, as the author clearly shows. What ...”

“... replaced the British aristocracy as the holders of power, wealth and status. Is it a plutocracy of self-made men, as Cannadine frequently suggests, or is it the professional middle classes? The first seem to predominate up to about 1925, but since then a case can be made that the real heirs are the second, the yuppies of our time. In 1884 Gladstone was afraid ...”

“... other Iraqis in the Republican Guard were free to suppress the Shia revolt in Basra. An engaging self-portrait emerges from Simpson’s story. He comes across as a man big enough to acknowledge his mistakes; with unusual tastes in people (he ends a pretty damning indictment of a ‘brutal’ censor called Mme Awatif with the touching remark, ‘I regarded ...”

“... the Piranesi streets of old Leghorn. The sky was gentian, no tragedians consoled the binding self-truth of my age; I couldn’t even claim to be your father. The effort is so eerie it seems to me Montale must have a hand in it as well as the translator. It would be interesting to know whether Montale – who published late books called Diario del ’71 ...”

“... than an illusion is the most bitter irony of all. Finally, nothing can be known absolutely. As his self-made priest, the barbershop ‘Minister’ of Georgetown, once told him, ‘human society was heading for a system that would strongly resemble the beehive, when the word pleasure would disappear from our vocabulary, a recent arrival anyway. Just as free ...”

“... book has to offer. It also contains musings on such matter as the nature of Beethoven’s creative self-criticism and speculation about the origin of commercial book-publishing in the Athens of Pisistratus; but such thoughts can hardly be developed within the compass of a short lecture in a way that will generate any conviction in their plausibility which is ...”