“... of them even highly original, they occur incidentally, almost accidentally, and the author’s self-imposed commandment not to say anything that might be ‘beyond’ any reader provides some readers with the heartening illusion that beyond what Antony Hopkins is saying, there’s nothing to say. To the music-loving amateur reader of the present review, I ...”

“... many of you have no doubt stood in the amphitheatre at Ostia, marvelling,’ declaims Mark in self-parody, for his sermons are always pitched over the heads of his parishioners. Sister Dew, eagerly scrambling upwards to test the acoustics, falls and has to be tended by Edwin. ‘In his veterinary practice he specialised in the treatment of small ...”

“... similarly restrict their astrologers to finding excuses. The Greeks invented ‘the rule of human self-reliance’ – a momentous step indeed. True, Finley knows well that the reality might fall short of the ideal. The fact that everybody could speak in the Assembly did not mean that ‘the ordinary citizen would have wished, or dared, to take the floor, or ...”

“... said that literature, her kind of literature (literature with a capital ‘L’), was frivolous, self-indulgent, élitist. That its study was irrelevant and mandarin. That those who studied it were incapable of recognising the true richness of life, preferring instead the rarefied air of artificial heights. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t take it so ...”

“... team has tried to evade the difficulties noted by Williams by playing down the distinction between self-identification (class-consciousness) – ‘I am a member of the working class’ – and reference: ‘He is a member of the working class.’ The tabulations throughout are concerned with reference categories: the hypothetical social classes, based on ...”

“... how he ‘picked his way through the profusion of texts’ provided by Biondo. The answer is self-evident. He read the section devoted to triumphs, which are conveniently examined in chronological order; noting Biondo’s remark that they became increasingly elaborate from the time of Caesar onwards, he concerned himself only with Caesar’s triumphs and ...”

“... of the Constitution more compatible with their own ideals, their decisions are not arbitrary or self-seeking in the narrow sense of procuring personal advancement. They do not decide so as to favour some group of political supporters or allies or cronies. Nor are they political in the narrow sense of partisan. In this respect, Justices are different from ...”

“... dissatisfied with the effect, judging by her zeal to dress up some of the original reviews with self-conscious little prefaces, and so to convert them into the more cumbrous literary pieces of her new manner. In practice, her ‘three-quarter face’ portraits seem just a series of interviews with celebrities of the film world like Buñuel, Godard, Jeanne ...”

“... two familiar and false generalisations on the head. Honor Lady Lisle – downright, businesslike, self-centred and sensible – would have been astonished to hear that 16th-century women lived a life of helpless slavery, and the loving relations between herself and her much older husband hammer yet another nail in the coffin housing the strange thesis that ...”

“... and the two went up and out into the crowded circus of the world. Alienated beyond recall. Self-exiled ever since the day when, as Dedalus, he saw that long-legged, bare-thighed image of innocence standing among the mirroring pools on Dolly-mount Strand, his idealised image of Nora Barnacle from Galway, an elemental, untutored, unspoiled, ignorant ...”

“... for contemplation or application, he would have nothing to think or talk about. Its thereness, its self-identity from one moment to the next, allows it to be contemplated, Thus, while meaning is a principle of stability in an interpretation, significance embraces a principle of change. There is of course a lot more to Hirsch, but here I need only add that his ...”

“... the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird is a fanciful and perhaps in the long run self-interested reason for behaving decently to birds, but it is highly germane to Mr Turner’s subject. It may even be an intuitive shot at a theory of evolution. And it must in practice be more conducive to ‘kindness’ than the Christian myth that non-human ...”

“... a few hectares in Calabria, a Dublin street, an English village, a youth will grow to knowledge of self, kin, country, finally enlarge to the extent of the world whose distant occupants may well seem to his patriotic mind a congeries of eccentrics who have yet to learn the full sweetness of his native air. By contrast, nationalism is not private, personal or ...”

“... deferred gratification, leisure rather than work, good form rather than the undisguised pursuit of self-interest were the boundaries of a tried and tested value system. Why toil in the counting-house? ‘Lat Austyn have his swynk to hym reserved!’ The aristocratic ideal was particularly attractive because, if necessary, it could be acquired on the ...”

“... which he was committed were wholly admirable: the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery it-self; Catholic emancipation and the relief of the Dissenters; the systematic reform of the tortuous and burdensome processes of the law; the extension of political rights; the improvement of educational opportunities, and above all the diffusion of ‘useful ...”