“... that any notion of rational planning will give way to panic. Ideology will at once take over from self-interest. Above all, it will be manifest that the only one of the two great powers likely to come out of the contest as ‘Victor’ must be the one which hurls its ballistic weapons first, furthest and fastest – and preferably before the weapons of the ...”

“... also finely verbal. Burrows’s commentary on the diagram wittily sums up his findings: Chiefly in self-gratifying anecdotes, Lydia uses ‘was’ at eight times as high a rate as Collins. With his honoured patroness ever foremost in his talk, if not quite foremost in his mind, Collins uses ‘her’ at almost eight times as high a rate as Lydia, who has ...”

“... remains. Andreas Baader, the undisputed leader of the group, was, from his earliest years, a self-willed, highly-talented nonconformist. Insolent, humorous and rebellious, he seems never to have obeyed any rules and had to change schools repeatedly. His last headmaster spoke of him as ‘a particularly gifted young man’, but noted that he got into so ...”

“... work as a historian can never be trusted and who had had a ‘disastrous effect’ on the national self-consciousness. If Marxism has erected signposts sunk in concrete, deconstruction removes all permanent landmarks from the landscapes of the past, downgrading or elevating history (according to your point of view) to an inherently unstable ‘discourse’ not ...”

“... who ignored the remonstrators, at their peril. Even before 1949, the habits of criticism and self-criticism were strongly engrained. Until 9 May an entente between the students and the leadership was possible. Beyond that point, though every sign suggests they wanted to avoid a showdown, even after the fall of Zhao Ziyang, the factors that combined to ...”

“... his name-saint cannot be a coincidence and Boucher argues persuasively that it may also be a self-portrait. At present the lighting on the statue creates numerous shadows that the sculptor cannot have intended, dust has darkened the salient portions (meant to be the lightest) and the baton held in the saint’s right hand has not been extended with a ...”

“... New Historicism has suffered. The Purpose of Playing is burdened, for example, with one of those self-important prefaces which feels required to situate itself within a totalising, idealist history of all the intellectual tendencies within the American academy since the advent of Theory, and is full of passages like this: in the discipline of ...”

“... as ‘irrational’. According to Lord Irvine, it is ‘the constitutional imperative of judicial self-restraint which must inform judicial decision-making in public law’. He also criticised recent rulings that require tougher judicial scrutiny of decisions affecting human rights, while maintaining his support for making the European Human Rights Convention ...”

“... dinners, for example – have turned into masquerade costumes, often worn with the uneasy self-consciousness that afflicts all uncustomary public appearances, and often selected without the sureness of taste that marks everyday choices. Gone, too, is any immense difference, discernible from a great distance, in everyday dress among social classes and ...”

“... flagged floor I notice a crust of wheaten farl and wonder if a visitor dropped it, or is it some self-conscious exhibit like the peat fire? Is the Folk Museum in Ulster or is Ulster in the Folk Museum? Should there be a great big old-style TV camera hanging over it? That evening I head out to meet two postgraduate students and pass the new concert hall, a ...”

“... did each day and what he wrote. He seems, Donoghue writes, ‘sentence by sentence, a textual self in the art of becoming’; and this makes him grist for the modern mill. There is nothing outside the text, certainly not a man who sits down to breakfast. And yet, paradoxically, all of Pater’s writing attests to the necessity and the enigma of the ...”

“... allow has an urgent religious significance. She cites the influence of Danah Zohar’s The Quantum Self which, like other popular treatments of quantum mechanics, offers an appealingly fresh and holistic account of the world around us, finding enormous significance in the tiniest particle and the most obscure event. To writers with an aestheticised Christian ...”

“... metal version of the faceted columns he more frequently made in wood – as, for instance, in the self-portrait on he opposite page) cannot match the concenrated power of the studio assemblages. It is the temple – which would have included he three Birds in Space (bronze, black marble, and white marble) already in the possession of the Maharaja of ...”

“... of her in London, represented in For Love Alone, brought back an adolescent sense of failure and self-loathing. She punished herself, walked everywhere to the point of exhaustion, and wanted to die. One of the illuminating sidelights in this biography is the brief account of Rowley’s 1987 visit to the Helping Hand Home in Adelaide to hear retired Professor ...”

“... her youngish diaries are sometimes convincingly happy-go-lucky, but the reminiscences by her older self sound rather as if she is ‘pretending everything is OK’. This is the third volume of her autobiography. Both the preceding volumes dealt with her merry young life during World War Two, which she much enjoyed: they have been read aloud as the BBC’s Book ...”