“... established six republics, one of which was Bosnia and Hercegovina with a high degree of local self-rule (by local Communists), and with all nationalities being well represented in the Communist Party and the central government. Soon afterwards, the Communists realised that the Soviet model did not apply to Yugoslav conditions, and set about establishing ...”

“... it meant rewriting a good part of the history of astronomy in the process. He had the supreme self-confidence of the Man of Letters, believing that astronomy itself could be derived from Criticism. His views on precession are worth studying, but only as an aspect of this strange academic phenomenon. On chronology as a whole, however, he had for a time no ...”

“... even by Chinese Buddhists themselves when they wished to avoid the implication in the customary self-designation ‘Middle Kingdom’ that the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment was not actually the centre of the universe, but in Japanese parlance clearly opprobrious: the derived word shinajin has some of the overtones of ‘Chinaman’ or even ...”

“... action. Significantly, Keegan is much more interested in an older and wiser view of warfare as a self-limiting process, copying the birds and the beasts in its comparatively painless strategies of confrontation and disengagement. Carthage personified this older view of things in its struggle with Rome, for even Hannibal had not the will or intention to ...”

“... man who wants to succeed in the world and remain decent at the same time. The twin discoveries of self and society are to the novel what counterpoint is to music, and Stendhal is their unequalled master. Lucien is Stendhal’s luckiest hero. Unlike Julien Sorel or Fabrizio del Dongo, he has a jovial and affectionate father who believes that ‘a son is a ...”

“... particularly drawn to the marginal state where the solitary world of the child borders on pure and self-sufficient autism. In ‘Maurice’s Room’, a boy can only communicate with the world by the exotic clutter he accumulates in his room. When his family move to the country, they rehabilitate Maurice by finding him a barn, as rich in rural clutter. The ...”

“... argument, or rather quasi-religious faith, is dragged into service, including the growth of the self-employed, although the election study shows that 71 per cent of them voted Conservative. But there was very little of his sort of cranky nonsense at this year’s Liberal Assembly in Dundee, and for once the Liberal Party looked the part of a conventional ...”

“... to defeat the NUM – the Coldstream Guards of organised labour – if she was to succeed in her self-appointed role of kicking the whole trade union movement into the Tory future and away from the principles of Labour Party style corporatism. This is the general case: that the NUM was targeted by the Government as the last great obstacle to an efficient ...”

“... had a bad press: ‘selfish’, ‘spoilt’, ‘unreliable’ – and full of the kind of moody self-pity that women are inclined to find attractive in men. ‘Someone cut the cards wrong at the beginning,’ he says in the first of the letters printed here, ‘and it’s been like that all along.’ It isn’t clear whether he’s talking about his current ...”

“... the ‘epicene waif’, Isabelle Eberhardt, who tried to ‘do a Pierre Loti’ in Algeria; and a self-intoxicated Scot, John ‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor, whose speciality was reaching the source of rivers by canoe, even when the source was a turgid swamp (his lecture called ‘Arma Virumque Canoe’, with practical demonstrations, had the mechanics’ institutes ...”

“... to endure endless fasts, to rise in the middle of the night for meditation and suffer agonies of self-reproach for dozing beyond the appointed hour? Puritanism roams the highway of our history, and before we could ‘explain’ it we would need to have the measure of the beast. Seaver’s book would be as good a starting-point as ...”

“... Eric Sams’s edition of Edmund Ironside, advertised as ‘Shakespeare’s lost play’, a neat self-contradiction as well as a declaration of prodigality, suffers from the same fragility of evidence without offering much encouragement from the text. Edmund Ironside has been known and read much more widely than ‘Shall I die?’ and few critics sprang to ...”

“... had long professed to help.’ As the peasants saw it, they were driven to resort to violence in self-defence: ‘Ideologically, chouannerie was a protest against the destruction of the moral unity of the peasant community.’ It was also a protest against the heavy-handed intervention of the towns and their National Guards against people whom the local ...”

“... breeding. If Makerere goes under, Uganda will cease to have any potential for educational self-sufficiency. Its present total dependence on foreign institutions will be perpetuated. The Club’s other residents, apart from Makerere ‘externals’, are World Bank employees: Americans who are investigating the prospects for tea production, a Chilean ...”

“... consists of one oracular pronouncement after another about language, and the world, and even the self and ethics and God, followed by the observation that to have understood all those remarks correctly is to see that they can say nothing at all. We are to throw them away after we have used them to grasp everything important – namely, what cannot be ...”