“... 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 ...”

“... on purely nominalist foundations. To this extent ‘Helliconia’ belongs to the category of the self-conscious novel, not to the fiction of attempted prophecy. Brian Moore’s Black Robe is a revisionist historical romance, beginning as a rational renaming exercise but ending by reciting the familiar names of Christian worship. The missionary tale, in which ...”

“... on my part. Read now, her article expresses something of the exasperation I feel myself at this self-indulgent young woman who knew better than her elders and cared so little about other people’s lives. But then I am now older than Betty Miller was when she wrote the piece. It also needs to be said that a very few weeks after that telephone call I was ...”

“... assertions remain suggestive and fecund: ‘Reynolds’s imagination lost some of its freedom and self-assurance when it ascended from the intermediate to the grand style. As long as he was translating the sublime into the fashionable, he was inventive and sure of his ground: when he reversed the process and attempted to raise the fashionable into the ...”

“... misconstrues his theory in a fundamental way: for it implies a theoretical recognition of self-righting market forces, albeit forces which are impeded in the real world. The authors’ discussion of the ambit of the ‘short period’ for this analysis is perhaps their most incisive contribution. Other papers in this volume, by J.A. Kregel on ...”

“... people were on the wane, though this as yet entailed no conspicuous deterioration, and no loss of self-assurance. Mark Bence-Jones starts with Irish hunting, and makes of it a daredevil and jovial business; next comes the sporty slaughter of many woodcock and pheasants. The Irish aristocracy acts true to type in this study, down to the display of ...”