“... consent gets a rather poor showing in the poem) the successful antagonist of the Father is a self-contradiction. It is not enough to say that it was reasonable of Adam and Eve to want to know, and simply wicked of God to make knowledge a forbidden thing. Milton’s God, who must be allowed some authority, says that it would have been better for them to ...”

“... tastes – are intended to suggest that any theoretical framework Brook might come up with is self-serving. In 1973, Brook described the purpose of assembling his Paris company. It was not a skills swapshop, each member displaying his tricks and operating ‘an exchange of techniques’. Rather, Brook said, ‘we are seeking for what gives a form of ...”

“... with his un-English, un-American accent, and reinvented as an estrangement. John Updike is a self-confessed fan, but Joyce Carol Oates, who is not, has also conducted a wonderfully ingenious argument with Nabokov in several novels including The Childwold in 1976 and her Chappaquiddick novella, Black Water, in 1992, where the question of who was in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the life of the man preferred by the girl he loves. Dickens had made a great impression as the self-sacrificer, and was probably right in thinking, as he wrote to an old friend, that if he had played Carton, he ‘could have done something with his life and death’. His attempt to set up a dramatisation in Paris fell foul of the censor and he had to ...”

“... it so hard to keep track. Sometimes it is hard to see where Rosenblum’s stereotypes end and the self-presentation begins. The Spanish are all laid-back, friendly and talkative until you start asking for details about their trees, at which point, fearing for their subsidies, they quickly dry up. They have endless lunches and present themselves as simple ...”

“... to be squeezed in. The last mentioned is the work of Rosie Jackson, who also reprints Frieda’s self-portrait Not I but the Wind. Ms Jackson believes it time to correct what she takes to be the hostile general view of Frieda, and to show that her insights into Lawrence’s work are important ‘for us in our current crises around gender’. What she takes ...”

“... 155 mm shells and they are highly mobile. The G5 can be towed around very fast, while the G6 is self-propelled. For months they had poured shells onto the plain, which was now disarmingly quiet. The battle for Cuito Cuanavale was all but finished; the land seemed to be re-emerging in its aftermath like an enormous plaster relief from which the mould is only ...”

“... memorable over the lifetime of an editor or his magazine. On the other hand, it isn’t at all self-evident, not to me at least, that a bad or mediocre book is superior to an effective or interesting book review simply on the grounds that a book is a book and the authors of books are nearer to God than the authors of reviews. No one would deny that reviews ...”

“... and cruelties. Evangelical literature is full of accounts of the pioneer missionaries’ acts of self-sacrifice and martyrdom. But secular observers, anthropologists for the most part, while not necessarily unsympathetic to missionary enterprise, have rightly been more concerned with their effect on Indian lives – effects to which the missionaries ...”

“... with reports of teenage gangs, street battles, vigilantes attacking ‘alien elements’, even self-styled Nazi groups. The administration of justice has come under fire, with Literaturnaya Gazeta reporting ‘a torrent of complaints’ against the actions of the militia, the procuracy and the courts. In January, Pravda announced the dismissal of a KGB ...”

“... power, where no statute has yet intervened’. Quite apart from this extraordinary act of self-arrogation, it is difficult to imagine any group further out of touch with contemporary morality than the Law Lords. Yet the years since 1961 have seen hundreds of convictions for offences against this impudently invented law. On the whole, it has been ...”

“... dismay. Foremothers shrouded in veils murmured from the sky ... joyous in his release from some self-preoccupation, some tense and Western inwardness. Here was something he could do something about.’ The last anyone sees of Abbas, he is running towards the aeroplane, arms waving, just as some troops arrive and a battle breaks out. As the battle ...”

“... may be that in Connolly’s case quarrelling was a natural extension of his endless capacity for self-pity. As for his wife, it was one of the things she did best, in life and in art. When Connolly was complaining about her to Edmund Wilson, he told him that she was busy turning her diary into a novel and that ‘it was intolerable to have this typewriter ...”

“... crucial question is whether there is any stage of a European war at which any nation would choose self-annihilation in preference to prolonging the struggle ... the probability, though not the certainty, but surely at least the probability, is that no such point would come whatever the course of the conflict.’ Mr McNamara has told us that when he was ...”