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“... conflicts. Its very existence offered the promise of a world in which the short-term goals of self-interested states and leaders would be constrained by generally agreed rules and procedures, allowing the long-term common interests of peace and co-operation to prevail. This promise is fast disappearing. The US, the world’s sole superpower, now sees ...”

“... feel comfortable talking to adults and resents having to spell out things that are, apparently, self-evident to children. Whatever the reason, the result is an edgy, self-righteous book and a lacklustre piece of propaganda. Since Mr O’Carroll sees nothing wrong with paedophilia, he isn’t interested in our ...”

“... it. And, like the type of epigram which it seems this poet prefers, they resist the autonomy and self-enclosure of the brief, pithy kind in favour of a more open-ended quality and a visible sense of being part of the surrounding life. They become, in another word used in the title-poem, ‘annotations’. And this image from the scholar’s art is not, as in ...”

“... with him that ‘the love of indirection, the cosiness of a tight personal élite, and the sheer self-importance of government servants, find their clearest expression in the intelligence community.’ In the course of my lengthy researches into the weirdly mixed social and political environment which led Anthony Blunt, among others, to play the traitor, I ...”

“... to be patronising? It explains why his own plays are artificial and ineffective, in that they seek self-consciously to separate out the plot, the jokes, the persons and the controlled release of meaning to ‘auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding’. The idea that some of us go to Shakespeare for one thing, some for another, is true only in the ...”

“... can we say of another claim: that ‘Joachim created the aggregate of symbols which govern the self-interpretation of modern political society to this day’? Or that ‘it is hardly too much to claim that the vague and powerful assumptions we all make about historical transition have their roots in Joachism’? ‘Aggregate of symbols’, ‘vague and ...”

“... stiff upper lip than significance in it. Craig does not retreat into such manly taciturnity or self-effacing understatement: he asks himself hard questions and he attempts honestly to answer them. For example, his children climb, and he has encouraged them to do so. He recognises what he calls the ‘poignant paradox’: ‘we spend our best efforts ...”

“... majority; and it can even be suspected to the contrary that cosmic unity is an invention of the self-repudiating Western mind, imposed upon the Native cultures by Western dissent for purposes ultimately Western. The present book avoids such manichean pitfalls, but confronts their methodological preconditions. Anne Salmond, a Pakeha anthropologist at the ...”

“... about that?’ sort of way) and politely suggested I call a truck rental company. A shop that had self-help manuals to cover every crisis of American life, from starting fourth grade to burying a pet, could only offer the Yellow Pages when it came to house moving. Not so in Britain, where moving house is always big news. And not so in my local bookshop in ...”

“... green peaches’). Sport, then even more than now, was the proving-ground of American virility and self-respect. How good you were at games determined how respected you were in the society of boys; how much you were noticed and doted on by adults, especially men; how much you thought of yourself. In baseball Ryan enjoyed one spectacular season as a pitcher by ...”

“... Indeed, there are moments when the reader feels that the author comes closer to being damned by a self-indulgent infatuation with words. There is a preciousness to many passages, a quality of the ‘set-piece’ and of an over-contrived ‘poetic’ style, that can be both irritating and embarrassing. It would be nearer the truth to say that this is the story ...”

“... be typical of Fisher if his gesture towards a popular readership proved yet another route to self-effacement. Until he was about forty, Fisher lived almost continuously in Birmingham. The city was his imaginative centre: what Paterson had been to Williams and Gloucester, Mass. to Olson. Those American precedents would come to matter over the years, but ...”

“... he writes ‘was not appropriate for 1992 and beyond ... The Thatcher years had made people more self-reliant and that “dimension” must be accommodated in Labour’s approach.’ As usual, there is no attempt to prove this. Who precisely was made ‘more self-reliant’ during the ‘Thatcher years’? The rich ...”

“... that Church doctrine and social custom imposed on sexuality drew especially vigorous criticism. Self-proclaimed libertines rejected constraints on premarital virginity and conjugal fidelity, heterosexuality and monogamy, chastity in women and chivalry in men. Evolving from the mid-century contributions of Diderot and Crébillon fils, libertine fiction ...”

“... recourse to the I Ching and interviews with friends who are mothers.The ceaseless metaphysical self-inquiry of Heti’s books is a maddening, but accurate, depiction of a world in which one cannot boil an egg or clean a toilet or get married without wondering whether there might be a more optimal way of doing it explained in a video on the internet. Heti ...”