“... has probably envisaged only in her worst nightmares into full employment? Where did jobs and self-respect come from?Not, it must be said, from accepting the advice of businessmen and bankers. Depression and recovery took place against the background of a monotonous litany, familiar now to British ears, intoned by the world of big business: that wages and ...”

“... of writing skill and the absence of the two basic needs of a good diarist, leisure and a sense of self-importance, mean that we have few first-hand accounts of the decision-making process from the female side, and the historian ought to have set out what the choice was. Implicit in Macfarlane’s position is that the marital decision was one made by the male ...”

“... now further assume that the pilot made a further off-the-cuff decision to disregard even his own self-devised flight plan and to make a minor cross-cut to save fuel. (The fact that this would, as Hersh admits, have saved negligible fuel we ignore.) This means that we also have to assume that the pilot deliberately lied to ground control in reporting his ...”

“... George Arthur, governor of Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania from 1824, was a puritanically self-righteous person, convinced that mankind is ‘born and saturated in wickedness’ and that his wards, in particular, required to be treated accordingly. He came from the Army; so did many others, of more commonplace military cast, accustomed to corporal ...”

“... of the story is relevant to the northern Nigerian tradition of ‘indirect rule’, whereby the self-righteous military men (first British, then African) permit local, civilian government until it becomes offensive to their standards – whereupon they swoop down. Miss Emecheta has long been interested in the influence of Sandhurst and Aldershot upon her ...”

“... like that of ‘the Daily Telegraph or some other “quality” paper’. Another reason is his self-assurance in his sense of rhythm. Comparing the old and new Prayer Books, he writes: ‘Perhaps only a trained palate would observe the difference here, and markedly prefer the older version ... As to rhythm, the Confession drags along like a lump of dead ...”

“... With this increased military proficiency among the senior officer corps came a certain political self-confidence as well. By 1943, Stalin had conceded the important principle of ‘unity of command’, which meant that the political commissars were now subordinate to the unit’s military commander. In a more visible bolstering of professional military ...”

“... One thing seems clear about the ‘Transparent’ method: if it is not to degenerate into mere self-indulgence, it must be based upon the most careful close reading. It will not do to ‘infer’ at arm’s length from the text, nor to ignore passages which qualify or contradict a particular interpretation. It is also unwise, in the case of ...”

“... if you catch it early enough, it will later learn to treat the foreign, injected B cells as ‘self’. Now graft the skin of a B-strain mouse onto the grown-up adult of an A mouse that has been injected with B cells as an embryo. A normal A-strain mouse would reject the graft. But the injected mice do not. They have acquired a tolerance for B-strain ...”

“... Harold Nicolson was to say of his wife, ‘is a heroine to everyone including her own darling self.’ But it took her a while to figure out what sort of heroine she was going to be. When she had finished a 65,000-word novel celebrating Edward Sackville, a modest hero of the Civil War, she added a coy ‘author’s note’ – she was then 14 – in which ...”

“... Furet as by those of Albert Soboul. To turn to what might be called the daily round (and how self-annulling it is) of governmental activity: in the economic field, the ideological rigidity of the chosen path may be contrasted with the timely pragmatism of those who have to carry it out. Rigidity of orientation or principle: no one is quite sure of the ...”

“... the world of space and time. Its symbol is the shared meal; the passport to it is freedom through self-knowledge. Some of this private teaching is to be found in the Fourth Gospel, more perhaps in the Gnostic tradition. (A Gnostic despair of the created world is heard more than once in Stewart’s book.) The last section of the book deals with the events of ...”

“... of Archbishop Williams, whose indomitable combination of deviousness, obsequiousness and self-importance spreads through the book like a running gag.) Mr Hutton writes memorably about mobile forces: about the rival armies questing each other across Warwickshire ‘like two great blind moles’ in the days before Edgehill, or about Charles’s army on ...”

“... at how lightly Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet of yes-men have got off. But then the Eye’s current self-image – of stout, no-nonsense, undeceivable conservative Englishness – isn’t so very far away from that of the Prime Minister herself. In a couple of years’ time, no doubt, the magazine will open its own wine club, and then we shall all know exactly ...”

“... into passionate and tender women in three hours – has scored another triumph.’ The self-congratulatory note is perhaps – given what we know – merely pathetic, but there is, too, a distinct, if perverted echo of 19th-century sentimentality to be caught here: the remark is irresistibly reminiscent of Nekrasov’s poem on the redemption of a ...”