“... of natural living, in respect of their families, their food, their homes and their numbers, are self-defeating as well as abhorrent. The Youngs’ farm in Worcestershire does well enough, although they are in debt and have had to accept a subsidy for turning cereal fields to grass, against their wish and instinct to keep their farming as mixed as ...”

“... Haim Baram has pointed out, there would be no Hizballah shelling if Israel withdrew from its self-styled security zone – one-seventh of Lebanese territory – which in defiance of UN Resolutions it has illegally occupied since 1978. Israel is still causing immense destruction in the south. But life must go on – after all, the theatres in Paris ...”

“... that is true of all lotteries everywhere, including our own. Without superstition, without self-delusion, they are nothing. All the choices we make in relation to the Lottery – the decision to play each week, the amount we spend each week, the numbers we choose each week – are attempts to unravel fate, to find the key to a particular kind of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is stuck with pop music, junk lit crit, trash TV, just as he is stuck, really, with himself – a self shaped not by action or direct experience but by a kind of bombed-out cultural passivity, a wry/glum putting up with what’s on offer, what’s served up to him, week in, week out. Soccer fans are nothing if not passive. The games they go to hardly ever ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... must be negligible, but the old Murdochian personality of the paper remains. To some extent its self-proclaimed ‘radical’ championing of ‘the people’ against privileged élites and unrepresentative government accords with the long tradition of anti-Establishment populism in Britain, from Paine to Priestley. As recent editorials show, the Sun, true ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... evils, though his equal commitment to the sanctity of property made him critical of London’s self-interested incitement of Southern slave rebellion. Moreover, in regard to India as to America, Burke took the fact of British imperium absolutely for granted: ‘there we are placed by the Sovereign Disposer.’ As Frederick Whelan remarks, what concerned ...”

“... when he plays down its connections with the present. What most historians need is more, not less, self-awareness about the political pressures which determine the topics they choose to research. Certainly, the subject which is at once too blandly and too provocatively called ‘British history’ was generated by political circumstance. J.G.A. Pocock ...”

“... Widmerpool. The man named is – notwithstanding Lord Longford’s highly Widmerpoolian attempt at self-identification – one Denis Capel-Dunn, a wartime Cabinet Office official described but not named in Faces in My Time, the third volume of Powell’s memoirs (where he goes by the nickname The Papal Bun). There is also a hint, or at least a non-denial, that ...”