“... obfuscating misbeliefs which can only be shown up and corrected by a knowledge of the past. This self-deception about the history of the family has particularly affected Western Europeans. Frenchmen, Germans or Englishmen, unless they have come across the work of recent historical sociologists, are likely to believe the following. That the co-resident ...”

“... Brogan points out in his biography, while Ransome ‘did not live to encounter that marvellously self-serving critical doctrine according to which the only subject of art is art and even such works as Emma are concerned chiefly with their own writing ... his tale comes close to exemplifying it.’ ‘Captain Flint’, a bald, fat man like Ransome ...”

“... defensiveness’. Much of his own book is, however, devoted to equally natural reactions of self-justification on matters in which others believed him to be at fault, as in his personal attitude towards official and public reactions to Michael Fagan’s invasion of the Queen’s bedroom. Already, after Lord Mountbatten’s murder, McNee, with the ...”

“... The circuit from pure objectivity to subjectivity is complete. Old men write retrospective and self-revealing novels. William Seward Hall (‘a corridor, a hall leading to many doors’) plays off against William Seward Burroughs. Much of the work revolves around fictional St Albans and Johnsonville, by actual St Louis Missouri, where Burroughs was born in ...”

“... from revelation, as the inescapable conclusions of the rational mind drawing upon certain self-evident first principles’. The question, in the first instance Vitoria’s question in lectures that circulated widely before his death in 1546, was whether the dominion over the Indians could be justified in this way. Vitoria was certain that the civil ...”

“... realities behind the tables and figures. Unfortunately, contrary to the views expressed in many self-congratulatory publications – Bronowski’s Ascent of Man is a recent example – man was a late starter and is slow in learning. It is only during the last few thousand years that his control of the environment has been sufficient to advance his health ...”

“... make me wonder whether I ought to pursue her (she is called Rachel N ... and I suspect is coolly self-centred like most women that I fall for).’ In 1939: ‘If I make any money in America ... then I may look round for a wife.’ In 1943: ‘In July 41, I met a girl called S ... Harry thought I might like her, & brought her to Cambridge one weekend ... She ...”

“... a bathroom, preparing for bed. One of the number was a future overseas bishop who was ‘extremely self-conscious about keeping the rule of silence after Compline’. The third man indicated that he had an important message for this spiritually superior person, then loudly whispered ‘Balls!’ in his ear. There is a peculiar tone in Williams’s ...”

“... ambitious young businessman, who enraged her father with his rough family – four elder brothers, self-employed cowboy building-trade men, who behaved badly at the wedding. Pam tried to support her husband against these toughs, always preying on him and pulling him down: but his snobbish bossiness proved as maddening to her as it must have been to his ...”

“... or half-truths delivered to the House in tones of deep and impressive conviction. Besetting these self-appointed élites were ‘social and economic tensions with which they failed to cope’. Barraclough has much to say in his early chapters about a slowing down of European economic growth in 1911, with sundry symptoms familiar to us today, among them ...”

“... attitude to life, unusual in a man in his late forties. The hero of After My Fashion is a self-portrait. Richard Storm has returned to Sussex from Paris, where he has made a name for himself with his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a traditionalist who thinks Richard far too ...”

“... turned into a voodoo carnival. Similar things are not unknown in Ireland, where Terry Eagleton’s self-consciously carnivalesque first novel is set. Saints and Scholars begins with a drably journalistic reconstruction of the execution of James Connolly at Kilmainham gaol in 1916. The opening pages are clumsily written – Connolly’s green overalls ‘stand ...”

“... in Sydney early last year after a show, which he had also done in Melbourne, consisting (‘self-indulgently,’ the programme said) of the Sandy Stone monologues and nothing else. Some of the scripts date back as far as the 1958 recording, Sandy Agonistes; some are much more recent. Sandy is now dead, but his ghost shuffles on still wearing his ...”

“... since Shakespeare wrote the Bastard’s great speech about it in King John, where it meant greed, self-interest, the opening bars of capitalism. Adshead’s book belongs to a recently growing genus of works on the history of particular commodities. To be of most value a study of this kind should be a part of general history, joined to the rest of human ...”

“... a clearer sense of what it is there for; whether Britain will be able to construct a new and self-gratifying identity either inside or outside a united Europe; whether if it can do so it will be at the cost of identifying a new enemy within, and whether or not that process is already well advanced – these are among the questions the book raises or ...”