“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... naked mole rats. Many sociologists see it differently, however. Backbenchers, they might say, are self-conscious in a way that mole rats are not; they are capable of explaining their own actions. But so what? asks Runciman. ‘The! Kung of the Kalahari are as aware as the professors and graduate students who study them of the function of meat-sharing in ...”

“... sale of his papers. Singer’s American career developed slowly, and involved a whole series of self-inventions and pseudonyms. In 1925, in Warsaw, he had renamed himself ‘Yitskok Bashevis’, taking his mother’s name and thereby distancing himself from his father and brother. In New York, working as a journalist, he signed his articles and essays ...”

“... leadership to the protest movement of the mid-Eighties. Now, the PC is a shadow of its former self; the PS has moved to the centre-left, ruling with its pre-1973 adversaries, the Christian Democrats; and the MIR is long dead. The Christian Democrats, having backed the coup for about a year, waited until the economic collapse of the early Eighties allowed ...”