“... that the Hartlepool Mephistopheles is riding for a fall – have by contrast largely treated the self-proclaimed ‘inside account of New Labour’s plans’ with contempt. ‘We’ve been reading passages out to each other in the corridors,’ one Labour MP says gleefully. ‘It is a work of utter risibility. Mandelson wanted to be the new Anthony Crosland ...”

“... artists who have taken the internationalist shilling, Thomas has illustrations which suggest more self-confident exchanges. There is one of Kaipel Ka standing beside a shield he has made – ‘used in contemporary fighting in the Papua New Guinea Highlands’, according to the caption. It is decorated with the logo of ‘South Pacific Export Lager’. Kaipel ...”

“... is characterised by its degree of elaboration, concentration, completeness, abstraction, self-consciousness, explicitness, regression, recession and technicality.’ Or he hits the note of hurt pride: ‘It is a short step from the risky handy proposition that to think at all is to theorise, to the oppositely risky handy one that only theorists think ...”

“... and the English Imagination’) that the mythic status of Captain Oates’s fruitless self-sacrifice is the direct result of the accretion of meaning around the idea of the snowy wastes. To the cultural historian, just to call Oates’s walk into the snow ‘fruitless’ is to declare oneself a member of the postwar generation. Until the Fifties ...”

“... for a kind of political writing that was (to use Craig’s own terms) modish, shrill, noisy and self-important. Eight of these essays are concerned with the contemporary careers of Craig’s chosen writers, whether public servants or members of the oppositional awkward squad. The odd ones out are reception studies, on Hölderlin and Heine. They are among ...”

“... of American poets brought together and brought over to England by Faber, in what is clearly and self-consciously a re-establishing of what Faber is calling its ‘American Connection’. The American poets – Simic, August Kleinzahler, and Chase Twichell – have all been done out in plain white-cover paperbacks, with modish modern art miniatures on the ...”

“... By 1990, I was onto something new, and the world of before was a little behind me. I had all the self-absorption that was common, and I settled on a plan (in a very Eighties way, I guess) to make my way towards a point at some distance from my childhood. And for all the Eighties were in some ways terrible in my eyes, for all they looked like a decade that ...”

“... dignity. In his warmth and spontaneity the artist is a model of the natural, productive, self-fulfilling man. Feeling and thought are equally active in him and joined to a truly social nature. Through this freedom and full individuality he serves others, including a future mankind That is not the staple teaching of art history, but it is the belief ...”

“... century, it may take some uncomfortable decades before the book trade rediscovers the virtues of self-restraint and the internal strength to reimpose it. What follows in the short term? Bad things, but different bad things depending on which countries you look at. In Australia, which abolished its NBA twenty years ago, the consequences seem to have been ...”

“... was never made to suffer for China’s misfortunes. After the Great Leap Forward, he did make a self-criticism of sorts; ‘For all errors directly or indirectly attributable to the central authority, I am responsible.’ But then he immediately added: ‘Many others also have a share in the responsibility.’ Whereupon Vice-Chairman Lin Biao ...”

“... work, pride and independence have – miraculously but inspiringly – survived among ordinary self-respecting people despite half a century of liberal condescension. The fact is that Margaret Roberts left Grantham a long time ago. A place at Somerville College, Oxford was the means of making good her escape in 1943. As a woman she could not join the Union ...”

“... of Lacan all along the line: he takes exception, for one thing, to Lacan’s ‘gloating, self-righteous “not-I-but-the-signifier” refrain’, which he likens to ‘the language of fundamentalism’ in seeming to impose a ‘supra-human authority’ on us as poor Speaking Subjects; and he seconds some of the arguments used by feminists against ...”

“... some nominated other. The challenge for the authors of Class War: A Decade of Disorder, as self-appointed bailiffs of a vanishing tribe, is to publish something more meaningful than a cover version of the rancid tabloids they so obviously model themselves upon. It is perhaps worth making it clear that Class War came into being as a loose federation of ...”

“... migration and unemployment on patriarchy, family and gender.) The ascetic disciplines of self-abnegation in the Orders are open only to men. Their severity characterises the inversions which anthropologists have noted in rites of separation and passage into another state. It also characterises a specifically male set of trials. Moreover, such ...”

“... and study than Hugo’s numbing spontaneity. Hugo has come down to us as the dubious paragon of self-assertion, at home, where he had it easy, but just as much in politics or in literature, as a writer whose pen too readily outran his great intelligence. Too much, however, can be made of this arrogance, as if the satirical purchase that it provides were the ...”