“... My scoffs were absolutely at a discount. And then I read a memorial interview with that old self-server and mass-murderer Robert McNamara. He recalled an occasion, quite early in the Lyndon Johnson presidency, when Jackie had come up to him at a reception in New York and beaten her fists on his chest, calling on him to stop the killing in Vietnam. Of ...”

“... these are seen as tainted documents, recording what the inquisitors wanted their victims to say in self-denunciation – a view that would disqualify a sizeable amount of what has been written on later medieval Europe, including such classics as Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. As befits a writer who has always identified the Jews with peoplehood rather than ...”

“... alas, as demanding) as Dante’s – he could seem irritatingly frivolous, irresponsible, self-regarding in his off-the-cuffremarks. ‘And what a cuff!’ one is tempted to add, all stiff with brocade. Early on, the poet and critic Richard Howard stigmatised him as a bejewelled poet, and that characterisation stuck, though it suited only his earliest ...”

“... failing which it may require reforms normally associated with the language of state retreat – self-governing hospitals, opted-out schools, co-operative pension schemes, lower levels of income tax. But it won’t work if these continue to be described as a means of escape from the state. The only real escape would come with the freedom to choose how ...”

“... as fantasy. Jonathan Haslam, arguing about whether the Cold War was inevitable, writes as a self-confessed sceptic about the value of such questions. ‘One dubious instance,’ he suggests, ‘is where the historian arbitrarily selects a single favourite variable, alters its weight or true composition, but holds all other variables from the same ...”

“... of 1930-2 did he learn how to touch the heart as well as to shock and show off. The process of self-education went right on up to the great chapel at Ronchamp. That would be consonant with the picture which Brooks draws. What is clear from this Bildungsroman is that Le Corbusier’s point of departure in 1920 owes everything to a very slow and often ...”

“... that everyone, even the békés, actually spoke was included, it took the form of a condescending, self-alienating phonetics – the quaint mumbo-jumbo of the p’tit nègre. The novelists Maryse Cond and Simone Schwarz-Bart still write in standard French and look primarily to their African origins; their work is only faintly inflected by the postwar trend for ...”

“... on the mainland. Besides there is a strain of Chinese nationalism within Hong Kong society itself. Self-definitions are divided. The Hong Kong Transition Project, based at the Baptist University, has been testing public attitudes in the colony at regular intervals since February 1993. One of the responses it has charted is the answer to the question: ‘What ...”

“... account as the most obviously successful exemplar of fundamentalist polygyny. ‘Tall, handsome, self-assured, intelligent and articulate’, Harry manages his five wives, 65 children and over three hundred members of subsequent generations with a seemingly invariable mixture of sensitivity and firmness. Known to the entire family, including himself, as ...”

“... of a devastating intellectual challenge but because of a social shift of élite interest and self-definition. There was, to be sure, a serious intellectual critique of wonder, which Bacon sourly defined as ‘broken knowledge’. He himself and those he inspired remained interested in monsters and anomalies, but the rarity, remoteness, brevity and ...”

“... the note of disdain with which the phrase is spoken, it seems that having a life is a matter for self-congratulation, and therefore the result of an individual’s character rather than merely the fact of existence and the effect of a series of random circumstances. Some lives are ‘life’ and some are not, but the precise nature of ‘a life’ is never ...”

“... that animals occupy’. Like Emerson and Thoreau, Lopez has a doctrine, a plan, an agenda for self-improvement. People, he writes, ‘must learn restraint’. In Arctic Dreams he refers to our ‘obligation’ to the land, our duty ‘to approach it with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try and sense the range and variety of its ...”

“... intervention by the scissors of anyone too sceptical to take this virtual enormity on trust.) The self-denying ordinance to which the members of the Oulipo are pledged has roots of a kind in Queneau’s own literary biography. For this was a man of secretive bent who had served his time when young among the Surrealists, but had then broken with ...”

“... must always be a matter of dispute. The selection of evidence itself can be a subtle form of self-censorship, but the sheer volume of new material he brings to light suggests that Ferguson was allowed to use anything and everything he found. The thirty chapters rest on a huge collection of archival material. I did a rough calculation for three chapters ...”

“... fulfilled ... the Dream and its dark side’. The dark side, too, of the old American gospel of self-reliance and action, especially as the Transcendentalists preached it. ‘Let us enter in the state of war and wake Thor and Woden,’ Emerson demanded. ‘Check this lying hospitality and lying affection.’ Consider Thoreau’s not-so-Green lament in ...”