“... that he would be willing to compromise on the issue of independence provided Beijing allowed Tibet self-governance: a one-country, two-systems arrangement, as in Hong Kong. Beijing will have none of it. One option for the Tibetans is to be patient, and hope that the CCP crumbles before they do. They might have time on their side: the Dalai Lama’s personal ...”

“... denied in the Soviet Union then, and still is in Europe today. If anything, the Russian self-image was even more high-cultural than that of the majority of Western European countries. The futile attempt to control or even to ban jazz and rock’n’roll in the Soviet Union is evidence of that. For the Americans, high culture, not just Modernism, was ...”

“... order to affirm the truculent, dignified singularity of things, which, like Paul’s ‘labile’ self or Robbe-Grillet’s ‘awkward residue’, by definition exceeds the machinations of ...”

“... guru derives from his Farewell Address, with its Kissinger-like cadences about the primacy of self-interest in international affairs; yet it was an act of almost sublime disinterest – Adams’s decision to send negotiators to France – that ranks as the most visionary act of foreign policy of the 1790s. Adams knew that he would divide the Federalist ...”

“... something that has eluded all British governments. He has repeated, and appears to believe, the self-serving conviction of British businessmen that they would be world-beaters were it not for over-regulation, red tape, high taxes and Brussels. Although he concedes there is ‘society’, a ‘we’ as well as a ‘me’, his is to be a highly privatised ...”

“... cuore, ‘heart’. But the word that most makes Montale look like a co-translator, rather than a self-sufficient original, is filtrando (‘filtering’), rendered as ‘straining’. For a moment, the English has an intensity which the Italian lacks: the eel strains in two senses, and it is hard to feel that if a word with the same ambiguity had been ...”

“... skateboarders to building engineers, this is not just carelessness on the part of insufficiently self-interested users; it is a critical part of the innovation economy. Why do they do it? Von Hippel identifies a number of motives. As with FLOSS, the innovator may benefit personally from the diffusion of an innovation because it increases the value of the ...”

“... of social policy as taught in Britain hardly touches on such issues, to say nothing about the self-satisfaction of inefficient bureaucracies. But to return to finance, there is obviously some awareness in these books of the difficulties with which the welfare state is faced. It is uneven. The book edited by Timothy Booth, Planning for Welfare, contains a ...”

“... called out the totals, and Mitch gnawed his fingernails like a starving cannibal reduced to self-consumption. Mitch had taken £14 10s 3d, Ray £18 4s 9d and myself £19 1s 3d. The following week was my last on the job. Aware of this fact, Ray and Mitch competed fiercely to exceed my takings, while I responded eagerly to the challenge. We ran, literally ...”

“... they have thought otherwise? From these pages there rises a weird yearning. Davie, in his modern self-exile, joins in his imagination those who lived in America but were Englishmen, ‘Englishmen who happened to live overseas’. To live in America then was to be – as it now can never be – not an English expatriate but an Englishman’s ...”

“... The dramatist’s purpose in devising ‘exploitable gaps’ in the comedies is always, he muses, self-evident. ‘But what is the result when the identical formula is applied in situations that involve life and death?’ Unfortunately, this query proves to be merely rhetorical. Evans never really answers it, except indirectly in the form of the particular ...”

“... and Goethe, they were unable to shake off their religious concern. In Clough’s case, the sheer self-destructiveness of the sceptical process and the guilt which haunted him over his sexual impulses revived his religious questionings. In the end, his overtaxed spirit sought safety in the sterile conformity of marriage, humdrum work for others, and a God ...”

“... of the spotlight dazzles our gaze. The thing we contemplate is not Edmund Kean, his very self and voice, but the Kean of William Hazlitt. The radiance of the report obscures that which is reported. Ms Kelly writes clearly for the most part, seldom with elegance. She gets into some frightful muddles of syntax: ‘Family commitments, among them to her ...”

“... women shun them as rivals. Marilyn Monroe’s tragic end is a classic case of beauty turning into self-entrapment. Beauty is a wasting asset at best: and if traded on the marriage market can only realise its full value in a single transaction – of which there may be long leisure to repent. Until recently, male beauty has been a much more exploitable ...”

“... university presidents. What’s urgently needed are academic leaders who, while willing to be self-critical, are better able to defend themselves against unfair ...”