“... most wonderful, the most honourable and the most unexpected manifestation of courage, virtue and self-control the world has ever seen.’ Cavour himself wrote to Durando that ‘the expedition of Garibaldi has turned out to be the most poetic fact of the century and is praised by almost the whole of Europe.’ Even as late as 1896, the cold Boston Brahmin ...”

“... abilities are in the mundane chores, while yours are in a higher, wider sphere,’ he says self-abasingly. What are we to make of a novel purporting to be a study of duality and neurosis, which contains so much preposterous nonsense? The Bay of Silence with its deadly-earnest tone and made-up grotesquerie, can only strike one as being altogether too ...”

“... in which it is likely to become persuasive without anything more being done. This effortless self-authentication is exactly expressed by Berkeley’s irresistibly lucid prose: it seems as if the decisive move was made before he put pen to paper. John Austin borrowed a phrase from Aristotle’s Poetics to describe this effect: ‘events outside the ...”

“... stood sternly erect, holding onto their reins in the stance of Greek charioteers. Their proud, self-confident bearing showed that they already felt themselves the rulers of Malaga. Yet no one, however closely associated with the Right, was molested. The workers, when their day came, did not intend to injure their class enemies. All men were to be ...”

“... money for leukaemia research, there was, as Frank Keating persuasively proves, not an ounce of self-publicism in it. He knew his stunt could raise money, so he performed it – at great physical cost. Everyone quoted in the book comments on the infectious warmth of the man as he made his way south. But then he threw a punch at an interfering traffic ...”

“... working on ‘a United Nations project’ and is not pressed for further details: ‘Project is a self-contained phrase and may or may not be capable of elaboration.’ TM muses: ‘I come across the word in newspapers and among academicians, engineers and adventurers. One might hear the word and keep quiet, no probing further.’ Rann might have sunk into ...”

“... once pure stream merely stinks – failing even to meander properly through the putrid valley. ‘Self-love’ swarms over the body of society, while loathing and contempt fester between ‘Brother ploughman’ and the new millionaire. But as Oliver is careful to show, ‘near at hand’ disorders such as these remain unseen if the eye is kept firmly fastened ...”

“... informants, and their bloody purges of the work-force, are connected with a larger phenomenon of self-destructive vengeance. Someth May’s use of images such as the Black Lady or the exploding leech is typical of his approach to the problem of how to account for the catastrophe. Sequences of cause and effect, or assignments of blame, are apt to trivialise ...”

“... quality of folk-sayings, fragments of a forgotten oral tradition, while her apophthegms sound self-evident, statements of moral fact. Within this robust structure the most delicate shades of subjectivity find shelter and flourish. Kate’s perception of other people’s motives and feelings is unfailingly scrupulous and acute, while the dialogue is ...”

“... of sexual enlightenment being confused with an unnatural and immature promiscuity of display and self-expression, which always leaves behind a stale depression of spirits. The public will be grateful to lose some of its freedom and to be protected from the prigs of public enlightenment (‘Anything goes anywhere’), no less than from the prigs of literary ...”

“... of social life, that Arnaud showed remarkable gifts for the presentation, or misrepresentation, of self, culminating in the courtroom scene where he remembered certain details of Martin’s early life better than Martin did, a point which impressed Montaigne and no doubt other members of the public. Following his usual line on the fallibility of human ...”

“... Phaedrus. In fact, if one looks at the text, Phaedrus contrasts rather than compares Alcestis’s self-sacrifice with Achilles’s decision to die in order to avenge his lover Patroclus. The gods, he says, gave more honour to Achilles because his devotion, as the younger member of a homosexual couple, was extraordinary: by implication, Phaedrus thinks the ...”

“... is that they are both inclined to argue that pastoralist economies are never autonomous and self-contained. In practice, pastoral economies and agricultural economies are nearly always interdigitated. But it seems that Marxist ideology requires Khazanov to treat ownership as a unitary concept. Resources are either owned collectively or they are owned ...”

“... course. The SDP is a party of prodigal sons (that is one reason why some of the stiffer and more self-righteous Liberals view it askance), and it is well-aware that repenting sinners should be greeted with fatted calves. But it will expect the repentance to be genuine; and it would take it amiss if the newcomers tried to hoist onto it a lot of old Labour ...”

“... or by their mothers who duly inculcated the virtue of ‘femininity’ – comprising gentleness, self-sacrifice (always in the interest of the opposite sex) along with a smattering of French or German – and imposed total suppression of independent intellectual interests, on the principle that ‘bookishness or intellectual confidence diminished a girl’s ...”