“... of middle age: for many, the role of rioter may prove to be a brief toying with a dangerous self. In the past such toying would end with courtship, pairing and a departure from the gregarious milling of the streets. Its end would be hastened by a movement into the adult world and a leaving behind of childish things. It would be made particularly ...”

“... their courage and their exhilaration at the success of Solidarity: it also explains a degree of self-obsession, a streak of fatalism, which seems stranger and more disturbing ‘under Western eyes’ – to turn Conrad’s phrase upon his native country. Outside the formal sessions of the conference, in which we discuss somewhat haphazardly the ‘Quest for ...”

“... to some extent on a small succession of supportive women. Lewis, although he made a brave show of self-sufficiency, lacked this independence, and was fortunate in possessing, beneath a carapace of bluff geniality and tireless contentiousness, an almost charismatic power of attracting personal devotion. He found his support in the first place in a small group ...”

“... of Science. These essays, specially written for the York Meeting of 1981, are more sober and less self-congratulatory than one would expect in a volume celebrating the 150th birthday of a venerable institution. Once again, the specific subject of the book is of less general interest than the light it throws on its historical context – the state of British ...”

“... Less obviously pernicious, but arguably no more helpful, is a long-standing form of ritual German self-abasement which ends by implying the opposite of what it states: qui s’accuse s’excuse. Hans-Magnus Enzenberger has written eloquently on this. At a higher level of moral and academic ambition, tough-minded analysis of the Third Reich readily generates ...”

“... all cases it starts slowly. It takes a literary turn, ensuring that its perpetrators have a lot of self-consciousness to get out of their systems before they go on to discover, if they ever do, that, like any other form of poetry, humour taps a deep instinct. But since for just that reason the comedian must go to school, and since the Cambridge Footlights has ...”

“... novels between what ‘really happened’ and what happened only in the mind are in one sense a self-conscious replay of the same narrative impulse, remote as these novels are from the gentle world of Arrietty and Pod. The Gulliverian tall story similarly oscillates between a cheeky flaunting of improbability and protestations of veracity backed by ...”

“... a man of commanding height, a middle-class barrister like Menzies, a skilled debater, supremely self-confident, a platform speaker who could rouse even an Australian audience. He became Labor leader in 1967 and Prime Minister in 1972. Here, at last, was the larger-than-life figure who could give the Australian Labor Party the image of sophistication and ...”

“... gives us to understand that Prince Charles is an expert on the subject, as he probably needs be in self-defence; it is to be hoped that he has supplemented these studies by meditation on the appropriate bits of Blackstone. Mercifully, however, royal personages are dependent on books for only a small part of their education. That the Queen ‘hardly reads at ...”

“... right to innocence, to a pure appreciation of life’s pleasures.’ And this is not mere showbiz self-pity. Does it seem preposterous that the evil, profligate dwarf should regret his ‘right to innocence’? The granting of that right to his audiences, precisely amid scenes of vice and horror, has been Polanski’s special ...”

“... ideal, inscribed on his temple (from which Socrates, outwardly a satyr, adopted it), was self-knowledge, and Dante began the Paradiso with a prayer to him: ‘Enter my breast and infuse me with your spirit, as you did when you tore Marsyas from the covering of his limbs.’ Plato said that the strains of the pipes, which he excluded from the ...”

“... in practice, of international capital’. Small is beautiful, especially in the form of ‘popular self-management’. As in Politics and Letters, Williams thinks that you could start with the kind of democracy ‘previously imagined only for very small communities’, and then use the new electronic technologies of communication in administering larger ...”

“... At Tokoza, also on the East Rand, most of the family were present at a Friday-night vigil when a self-styled prophet put it to a group of the relatives that the deceased, Buti Choechoe, was not really dead and that he could be revived. The family split into two factions. Those of little faith questioned the credentials of the ‘prophet’ and distanced ...”

“... Imports declined dramatically, however, as the Victorian epoch entered its most confident and self-regarding phase. Keeping foreign (i.e. French) novels out became the watchword. Moretti’s marked distaste for England derives from its cultural insularity (sustained in our own time by F.R. Leavis’s ludicrous prejudice against ‘foreign’ novels) and ...”

“... taverns and coffee-houses, energetic, wide-ranging in their interests, and abundantly endowed with self-esteem. Pepys was the progressive administrator, Halley the precise astronomer, but sea-water ran through their veins with equal strength. The Navy and naval concerns substantially structured their careers. In the late 1680s, Pepys was probably one of the ...”