“... by the Prime Minister early on, but she cannot have been surprised when many dismissed this as self-serving hypocrisy. And it is not just the unemployed who believe that ministers are now ‘out of touch’, or who think that the closest Mrs Thatcher gets to the problems of public transport is when her Jaguar gets stuck in a traffic jam. Why should someone ...”

“... meanings of total utterances were obvious). Moreover, since domains of assumption have internal self-coherence, local progress in interpreting an old text enables further inferences about others. But can we assume that literary works qualify as utterances like those of ordinary language communication? Sperber and Wilson argue that the principle of optimal ...”

“... up. Not until Seymour-Smith, that is. He has simply decided that the received account is a lie, a self-invented myth, which Kipling later told himself and the world in order to manufacture a suitably damaged childhood and to punish his mother. (His sister incidentally supported the lie in order to grab some of the limelight.) That he can produce absolutely no ...”

“... sports versus improving recreations, for example), and thus ‘the route of the working classes to self-expression and the development of an independent culture ... was thrown open.’ As I have mentioned, Thompson also believes that influence could be exerted in an upwards direction in the society: he sees some part of the bourgeois Victorian ideal of the ...”

“... the one hand by the spread of scientific attitudes and on the other by a new Protestant ethic of self-help and stoicism in the face of suffering, he concluded, with admirable honesty, that there remained something mysterious about how exactly faith in unaided human powers triumphed over traditional fears. For magical cures lost their prestige before modern ...”

“... chatter’, and the one consistent thing about Porter’s quacks is their remorseless self-advertising and puffery. The rhetoric has become more ‘organic’ and ‘holistic, but modern ‘fringers’, too, rely heavily on persuasion, in extreme cases close to mental domination or seduction. But perhaps the only answer (a very unsatisfying ...”

“... status-graded civic culture. At the most basic level, it even obstructed elementary self-protection: thus the Callaghan Government was so immobilised that it could not contemplate the one thing which might have perpetuated it – electoral reform. Yet historically this omission is less indefensible than it seems. In the first place, the ...”

“... she is invoking the words and rhythms of the Russian Church, and this seems to purge of all self-consciousness the fact that she is talking about herself, her predicament and anguish. At the crucifixion Mary Magdalen sobbed; John, the beloved disciple, stood ‘with face like stone’. ‘Nobody looked into the silent mother’s eyes, nobody ...”

“... vigilant anger. If you wish to enjoy this anthology as it should be enjoyed, you should ignore the self-serving introduction, with its unconvincing protestations. ‘I have no wish to sentimentalise orality, only to ...’ Really, no wish? Quite sure you don’t have just a teeny such wish? But then a good anthology is more magnanimous and wise than anything ...”

“... word. Maly was executed in the purges of the late Thirties along with many other KGB agents – self-blinded idealists and clear-eyed brutes alike. The Magnificent Five, who in the Forties and early Fifties provided their masters with vast quantities of material, lived to see the KGB dilute the intelligence their thousands of foreign agents pumped back with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... notice in an assembly; he tended to mumble in a thick accent; and he was wary of strangers. The self-effacing are, of course, perfectly entitled to efface themselves, but MacLean tended to denigrate himself as well. Could he possibly be worth all that money? According to Webster, he would protest: ‘I’m no good but one day I’ll write a good book.’ At ...”

“... half-grotesque urban types, their incisive characterisation. Richardson concedes that Picasso’s self-portrait in pen and watercolour of 1899 is inspired by the Beggarstaff Brothers but not that it is their influence which makes his spectacular series of portraits in charcoal and pastel of that year so much bolder and more memorable than those by Casas with ...”

“... and other bodies in order to build a wider psychoanalytic culture. As Steiner points out, the self-scrutiny to which Klein incited her colleagues, some of whom were mourning the double loss of Freud and their native country, ‘involved not only neurotic but also psychotic anxieties’, and it is no diminution of the achievement of the British Society to ...”

“... 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 ...”