“... the currency in which professional worth is measured. In a tenure review, or job interview, at a self-respecting American university ‘refereed articles’ count heavily. In humanities subjects (English, history, modern languages) they don’t carry the same weight. This disciplinary difference was at the heart of the Sokal affair. What Sokal was up in arms ...”

“... to make us think again about the individual pieces. Certainly, the art of display has been self-conscious at Millbank ever since Nick Serota’s arrival there. However, the manifest care and attention with which the paintings have hitherto been hung and spaced and the sculptures placed has not for the most part been designed to create provocative ...”

“... its rabid nativism chimed in perfectly, it seems, with America’s post-World War One retreat into self-nurturing – and, with Prohibition on the statute books, its purgative ambitions seemed likely to be smiled on by the Federal Government. During Prohibition, the Klan took to unmasking local bootleggers and if a Klansman were to be caught downing a quick ...”

“... done, in the jargon of the day, so as to ‘avoid scandal’. But then, how minuscule appear the self-evidently scandalous doings of any of this ‘set’, compared to what we have since learned and understood.The book opens and closes in Holloway Prison, where in a princess-and-the-pea setting that by no means denies sympathy to its subject, a society ...”

“... This Rhodes found galling for both personal and strategic reasons. Whether as premier of the self-governing Cape Colony or as managing director of the new Charter Company, he was determined to obtain complete mastery of the road and its hinterland. All of which brings us to Neil Parsons’s entertaining and exhaustively researched account of a visit to ...”

“... focus; it’s forever getting mixed up with whether animals’ thinking is ‘conscious’, or ‘self-conscious’, or whether it’s ‘symbolic’, or ‘semantic’, or whether it’s ‘like ours’. Such conflations are practically irresistible, and Budiansky commits them regularly. Budiansky is inclined to think that being conscious has something to do ...”

“... a homely ‘Welcome’ mat outside), offered refreshment and asked to put our valuables into self-addressed envelopes – as if we were arrested men at a London police station. I guessed correctly that this meant we would be going past metal detectors, guarding against assassins. Eventually we were seated in a great hall, some three hundred of us, and ...”

“... Council novel’ by an Englishman, if he knew enough. One remarkable feature is Anita Desai’s self-confidence and plausibility when dealing with males and their dealings with one another while no woman is present: in this she resembles the more hard-hearted Patricia Highsmith. It is not until page 58 that a woman appears – and then she is presented as a ...”

“... out into the future; apart from Ved, of course, whose eyes are turned down. (When he became self-conscious in adolescence he worried about whether they were open or shut.) Mrs Mehta peers into the future too, but she looks apprehensive. The boys are neatly dressed in tweed jackets, collars and ties. The girls, however, are in saris, except for little ...”

“... have been worthier of comment. Mr Pitcher does build up an engaging picture of the sedate and self-contained British colonies in Moscow and St Petersburg, with their curling club, football league, debating society and toytown ecclesiastical controversies, but too many of his stories end with an implicit ‘Phew! That was a narrow squeak!’ Industrial ...”

“... of Stanley Baldwin over ‘the King’s matter’ in 1936; and, apart from that, the King was self-willed, capricious and erratic. Fortunately he was also lazy. Liverpool survived partly because in 1812 the Prince Regent lacked the energy to get rid of him, and as time passed, he became a habit, easier to follow than to break. The century that followed ...”

“... exercise of power. And it irritates me enormously.’ Lucas has constructed a professional self which is the opposite of the stereotype Hollywood director, riding-booted, temperamental, flamboyantly brilliant, political. His inconspicuous mufti and straitlaced life-style disdains the world of moguls and casting-couch morals. Against the ‘old ...”

“... figure in ‘Jimmy and the Desperate Woman’, for example, who is so fascinated by the dourly self-sufficient miner’s wife yet so unable to match her kind of integrity. Rico the painter in ‘St Mawr’, fraught with panic and a fear of animality beneath his fashionable cool. The successful writer in ‘Two Blue Birds’ who toys with his secretary’s ...”

“... concerned with the outside world, like Pepys, or more introspective, like Kafka, will be less self-conscious. He will write down what the paper demands of him and leave it at that, certainly not bothering about the form of it any more than about possible readers. Much of Sassoon’s record is vitiated by his continually seeing himself as a diarist, as ...”

“... of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government.’ Thus Madison in the Federalist, No 55, identifies the need for virtue in the citizens of a republic, while in No 57 he says that ‘the aim of every political constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers, men who possess most ...”