“... 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 ...”

“... such as Iran, Mexico or Venezuela were zones of unionisation, democratic activism and sovereign self-assertion. Given the geopolitics of the Middle East, the prominence of Opec and the power of the oil lobby in the US, it isn’t surprising that oil-based monomaterialist theories of modernity prevail. But transition theory may not have become so dominant ...”

“... revolutionary diplomats, the chief target of the hostage takers, describing Afrouz as ‘a sleek, self-satisfied opportunist with a paunch’. The deputy press attaché, Abbas Lavasani, who was to be shot in the head and his body dumped outside the embassy door, thereby precipitating the SAS assault, is dismissed as a ‘spy’ and ‘fundamentalist ...”

“... and anxiety over the gallimaufry that is the English lexicon was replaced with triumphalism and self-congratulation: so it remains today. It’s no secret that modern English is saturated with French. Insults and derogatory terms owe much to the French example – bastard, brute, coward, rascal, idiot. French oozes from the language of food and ...”

“... the transgressive power and chilly stylishness of all this (nor how close it often sails to self-parody). But it seems at least as much a ‘private vocabulary of symbols drawn … from the writer’s mind’ as it is a case of ‘analysing external fictions’. What isn’t immediately clear is whether those two ways of thinking about the novel can be ...”