“... Jacek Kuron, the driving force behind KOR, the Solidarity think-tank: ‘Can a revolution ever be self-limiting?’ A few days before his arrest in November, Kuron reaffirmed his belief that Solidarity had modestly to acknowledge Poland’s ‘geopolitical situation’ (Poland’s code phrase for admitting that it is in the Soviet sphere of influence): in ...”

“... to be able to slug it out toe to toe with a dictionary (OAD) that does not announce its self-census, but probably weighs in at upwards of 70,000. But is one to conclude from that remarkable achievement that LNGD is a remarkable children’s dictionary, or rather that if its selection of vocabulary is really what ll-to-16-year-olds need, then ...”

“... Ethology in the modern sense, and not John Stuart Mill’s, the study of animal behaviour, is self-evidently a biological science. And insofar as it concerns itself with non-human animals, it has no agents’ accounts to contend with. Least like a novelist, therefore, certainly least like a bad novelist, for he writes with a quite compelling ...”

“... on the testimony, that full awareness can develop. To this extent, Sweetsir is a work built on the self-importance of the Lawrentian proposition that only fiction can give us the ‘whole hog’. Yglesias’s novel is an effective mixture of fashionable polemic, courtroom melodrama and topical allusion to currently celebrated crimes of passion. Whether women ...”

“... She deliberately evokes the world of Julius and Augustus Caesar, where well-meaning, self-seeking senators slide nervously past the shadowy colonnades and smooth youths snatch bangles from the sleek arms of tempting girls beneath statues of Pompey and Hermaphroditus, while the street-gangs of Milo and Clodius achieve respectability by running ...”

“... of class, economics, bureaucratic systems and the like, concentrating instead upon the essences of self, nationhood, community and Zeitgeist.’ Now there’s something worth arguing about. The short answer is that he’s been reading Benjamin on Fascism as the culmination of the attempt to make politics aesthetic. The longer answer would need a context it is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to have stimulated James’. But it is never settled or predictable, and occasionally an ironic self-consciousness will emerge, as when he acknowledges that ‘the kind of name-dropping, rapid shifting of context, and unwillingness to stay for an answer which this [Deweyan] culture encourages runs counter to everything that a professionalised academic ...”

“... worlds at once.’ The disparate paragraphs of his ‘Peter Simple’ column seem to support this self-analysis. If Wharton had more will-power he could be a playwright, easing himself into different roles, rapidly switching his persona. Sometimes he appears as a decent old buffer, a Victorian paternalist with faithful workers on his grand estate; but ...”

“... much background detail about Lloyd George’s relationship with Frances Stevenson and her willing self-immolation on the altar of his political career (clearly Frances would never have been permitted to keep Lloyd George awake at nights with nagging, as Asquith was kept awake in November 1916 by the midnight frenzies of Margot). There are some comprehensible ...”

“... attender at funerals and a good friend to those in trouble. He disliked the telephone, motor-cars, self-advertisers, Jews and universal education. ‘In the old days,’ he said, ‘the daughters of concierges became danseuses: now they have diplomas from the town hall.’ He was angry at any attempt to obtain public honours for him. The background which ...”

“... necessity of illusions, a necessity to which it sometimes romantically gives way with a certain self-consciousness. Thus Cunha lucidly notes how the soldiers propagate atrocity stories about the jagunços (‘ruffians’) who were their opponents: ‘They believed such stories as these; they made them up, seeking in advance an absolution for their ...”

“... with the classes so much more divided. Thus the 1830s and 1840s saw socialists promoting a self-developing Lamarckian biology as an anti-Church-and-State device. Bourgeois Benthamites exploited Geoffroy’s philosophical anatomy, while Dissenting mercantilists sported a progressive naturalistic cosmogony. Oxbridge divines and ‘Old ...”