“... for who will verify that? Fourth, and most embarrassing, the principle of verifiability is self-refuting: for either it is itself empirically verifiable, or it is ‘merely formal’ (whatever that may mean), or it is meaningless. Since it cannot claim to belong to either of the first two categories, it seems condemned to belong to the third, in which ...”

“... character: the British, while praising their own character, blamed the modern age and its heedless self-confidence. According to Filson Young, a down-market man of letters, it was ‘an impious blasphemy’ even to have conceived of building a ship of such ‘monstrous proportions’. The Bishop of Winchester described the Titanic as ‘a monument to human ...”

“... was more or less skilled) was, but was not, radically-inclined. Samuel Smiles was a Scotsman, and self-help and thrift were in his native air, inspiring the growth of co-operative societies and a most significant Temperance Movement, which arguably played the same role in the origins and early days of the Labour Party as Non-conformity did in England. The ...”

“... extent brought on themselves. To use Hynes’s words, ‘part of the argument was that English self-indulgence and English tolerance of disruptive movements, like Irish nationalism and Suffragism, had encouraged the Germans to think that England would not, and could not, fight.’ Then, as knowledge of the actualities of trench-warfare began to enter the ...”

“... to bottom of Israeli society in the aftermath of victory in the Six-Day War. Whether it was the self-assurance of the military which infected the politicians, or the politicians’ commitment to the status quo which subtly influenced the outlook of the military, is not easy to determine. What is clear is that when the country was about to confront a ...”

“... truss, worn from boyhood, and of Updike’s father’s ‘pathetic sweat-stained truss’ in Self-Consciousness. Constance’s mother dies of an aggravated rupture, caused by lifting her invalid husband from bed to bathchair and back again: ‘my mother unconscious and gasping in an awful way looked quite different – sunken and grey. Grandmamma was ...”

“... various transformations and dilutions, provides no excuse for the falsifications, compromises and self-deceit which Communists had to practise, but it does give such evasions a framework which is not wholly evil. Yevtushenko is not evil, though he did well in an evil system: he took care of number one, but he also had some care for others. Few, in the moral ...”

“... revolutions, in a series of profiles of, say, Davy, Faraday, Babbage, the Brunels – the self-made men and their machines. They emerge just sufficiently distinguishable from one another and from the politicians and artists they are seen rubbing shoulders with – who in due course appear in clusters of profiles too. While never sounding remotely ...”

“... But then Albert died. Like many a Victorian woman, the Queen wanted to withdraw into the self-enclosed seclusion of private grief and gloom. And for over a decade, that is precisely what she tried to do. But although she was now a widow, she was also still the Queen, and during the 1860s and early 1870s she found it exceptionally difficult to ...”

“... with a master hand, and it is built like no other music of this or earlier ages. So profoundly self-educated that it may seem to deny the very existence of those colleges and conservatories in which the young Górecki spent many arduous years, it is a music without social graces or pretensions. It is – to be as blunt as Górecki himself – the music of ...”

“... His less controversial conclusion is that ‘the agenda of late 19th-century sexual liberation was self-servingly devised by men, and spurious in its concern for women.’ Among Place’s contemporaries, only William Cobbett disagreed with him, believing that the change was no more than ‘modesty in the word and grossness in the thought’, as proven by the ...”

“... than it was in the days of Johnson, Kissinger, Reagan and Shultz. That hardly seems a matter for ...”

“... to shareholders capital they ought to keep and re-invest, so the prophecy of slow growth becomes self-fulfilling. The net result is that we consume too much, and invest and produce too little. This is all perfectly true, but much of the time Hutton gives the impression that he thinks it all began with Thatcher. At other points he writes that these have been ...”

“... right words in the wrong place, and vice versa’. These pieces were regularly returned in the self-addressed stamped envelope that the Writers and Artists Yearbook advised. Lately, when they plopped through the letterbox, Father didn’t open them, but tore them up, stamped on the pieces and swore in Urdu, cursing the English who, he was convinced, were ...”

“... sense of decline: a widely-shared view that British social and political institutions are self-evidently defective – a view held more intensely since Mrs Thatcher’s efforts to legitimate a reactionary version of them are generally held to have failed. In 1942 it was difficult not to be impressed by Britain’s comparative social integration and ...”