“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 1962 after a run of terrible by-election results, this was entirely typical of his undeviating self-interest, although in that Night of the Long Knives it turned out he had been so sharp he cut himself, fatally. Not surprisingly, throughout his life he was disliked by many and hated by quite a few. At Eton, he received 13 blackballs in the election for the ...”

“... a more literary and intellectual romance with the Dantesque Beatrice. In scenes of tortuously self-regarding rhetoric, Richard insists on having everything out in the open; Robert is appalled by the fact that communications he thought had been secret were not; Bertha is upset that her duplicity has been revealed to Robert at her expense. Eventually all ...”

“... best remember, when she portrayed the painter Gwen John in a biopic. This included one of John’s self-portraits in which she painted herself nude. Not unlike Gwen John in looks and figure, Anna did it nude herself though she would have been well into her fifties at the time. It was superb and also courageous, actors who are so often mocked for their ...”

“... in Eugene Onegin, is that Pushkin’s attitudes towards the country were as conflicted as the twin self the novel in verse projects. When he stayed at Mikhailovskoye after graduating from his elite Petersburg lycée he was both delighted and impatient. ‘I remember how happy I was with village life, Russian baths, strawberries and so on,’ he wrote. ‘But ...”

“... than it does about democracy. Empires tend to give peoples who have enjoyed them a markedly self-absorbed, provincial outlook: a fate Brazilians have no more been able to escape than Britons or Americans. For the fact – obvious enough in any comparative perspective – is that the local preservation of democracy is no particular merit of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... get a licence to film in public places or screen his films publicly. The festival can be jarringly self-congratulatory, but it also has real power: the decision to include a particular film makes a dissident director into a celebrity, which gives them a level of protection in their home country. Despite everything, it was a subdued Cannes. On the second ...”

“... a story,’ Tokarczuk wonders, ‘that would go beyond the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self?’ Yes there can, she thinks, and it will be told by ‘a new kind of narrator – a “fourth-person” one … a mysterious, tender narrator … a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen’. ‘Seeing everything,’ she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... health, David Owen, had told the House of Commons that he was funding an effort to make Britain self-sufficient in blood products by 1977. But he was given a new brief in 1976. The Labour government dropped the commitment to self-sufficiency soon after, apparently for financial reasons. Much of the relevant ...”