“... dealings with Britannia Biscuits. ‘Ask him to show it to them,’ he said with great pride and self-assurance. The piece of paper, which seemed blank at first glance, had its entire space filled with three large words written with a ball-point:                 BRITANNIA                       IS ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... books, a kind of de-graded art, hybrid, impure, heterogeneous, visionary, obscene, dangerous, self-contradictory, chaotic? Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism cites Blake’s remark in its early pages in order to mediate an assertion and a denial. The assertion is that culture is a crucial factor in the desire to found and maintain imperial ...”

“... the 19th century, when homosexuality was made into a disease rather than just a sin or crime, that self-reprobation became a real problem for practising homosexuals. This is the view urged on us since Foucault, but it is difficult to believe. Heterosexual men of the 17th and 18th centuries felt a good deal of anxiety and guilt about their sexuality, and they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bust. And he commissioned Roubiliac to do a sculpture of Shakespeare in the guise of a prosperous self-made professional just like himself. He also re-wrote the plays in accordance with bourgeois sensibilities.Yet the cult of Shakespeare flourished because he could be plausibly presented as outsoaring mere sectional interests. By the time of Garrick’s ...”

“... of infant Harold and his dad outside Number Ten.) The humdrum chapel morality; the Nonconformist self-righteousness; the passive-aggressive display – when the antagonist was insecure enough – of a homespun Yorkshire chauvinism. I did not know, until I ploughed through Ziegler’s lustreless narrative, that the undergraduate Wilson had had a flirtation ...”

“... the headaches and the tinnitus he suffered from permanently, and going on in more extreme fits of self-commiseration to hint at a trepanning. He was a sensualist and an idealiser of bodies, and his own impaired one was the receipt he could afterwards show for his real but costly patriotism in 1914. Together, his medal and his disability pension authorised his ...”

“... he wants us to like his central figures, and we do, at least at first. The dialogue is rather self-consciously written, as by an author who knows he has a reputation for crisp conversation, and the insistence on brand names sometimes seems a little strained. No car moved or drink drunk without the make and the label being dutifully spelled out, as in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... genetic make-up or evolutionary history of the organism that does the suffering. If this is not self-evident, then consider the following hypothetical cases. Martians invade earth and proceed to enslave and exploit human beings: they do to us all the things we now do to our fellow species on earth. Our lives accordingly become a hell of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”