“... was a close-run thing, for all the decisiveness of the eventual victory. Despite its bravery and self-sacrifice, the Argentinian air force failed to exploit its opportunities against the carriers and liners, and at San Carlos – as General Moore admitted – there could have been a disaster had the enemy concentrated on the landing craft rather than the ...”

“... but there was also an ideological and intellectual anti-semitism. Some people derive a sort of self-justification from denouncing Jews and from creating or sustaining an anti-Jewish mythology; and this was made more respectable – or systematic – by a number of left-wing thinkers who were known to be anti-semitic: Fourier, Toussenel and Proudhon all ...”

“... It is no longer ‘a pleasure to go down into the stations of the Underground’. Rasmussen’s self-confessed Whiggism now seems more distorting than illuminating. Selectivity may be necessary in writing about London, but what conviction can a general argument about the city carry which is made by ignoring slums, suburbs and poverty, as well as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... represented as the result of its place in a larger system. So both criticisms are directed against self-contained atomism, and both replace it with a kind of holism which treats some of the features of interconnected things as the products of their interconnections. However, though it is easy to see how this change explains his critique of the all-powerful ...”

“... the sequence of chapters, giving to each a structure, and a title, which suggest a succession of self-contained episodes, several of them being individual ‘ghost stories’ in their own right. (It must however be said that the greatest mystery of all, which survives the end of the novel, is that the chapter with a reminiscent title, ‘Whistle and I’ll ...”

“... for which the dictionary industry itself is responsible. What is unfortunate is that the war of self-advertisement between rival firms has had to be based on conning the public about the nature of lexicography. Thus, for example, if the consumer consults the Oxford Miniguide entry for the word scabrous, he will be told in no uncertain terms: ‘Scabrous ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in football began with the Hillsborough tragedy of April 1989. Hillsborough was the result of a self-fulfilling Thatcherite prophecy. The Tories were determined on a crack-down against hooligans; the police were paranoid and, as a result, they failed to operate effectively. The disaster was caused ‘not by hooliganism but by football’s political desire ...”

“... All the conventional arguments, about great-power tyranny and the ‘socialist camp’, or about self-determination v. ‘giving ammunition to the enemy’, were gone over as a matter of course. Somewhere in there, but waiting for an idiom in which to be unambivalently uttered, was an expression, or affirmation, of human and civil rights as a good thing in ...”

“... man; as the first secular Jew, or secularist tout court; as the first political Zionist; as a self-hating Jew; as a quasi-Buddhist; as an early feminist. All of these have been proposed. Which is right? Many new possibilities of deciding that question now exist, based on our much greater knowledge of the Jewish community of the Netherlands and Dutch ...”

“... its secrecy? On an expedition to a nearby tourist island to buy rice for the camp, Richard is self-righteously disgusted by the loudness and sloppiness of those who inhabit ‘the World’. Then, just before sailing back, he comes across the body of a recently dead junkie, lying beside his sleeping girlfriend. In order to save her from the shock of ...”

“... a remarkable conversion, turning for inspiration, like the early Christians, to the son of a self-employed carpenter. When this expedient failed, the Tories discovered a more plausibly messianic figure in the person of a grocer’s daughter, who erratically fulfilled some of the relevant prophecies by driving virtually everyone except the moneychangers ...”

“... which is less accomplished but possesses much of the same drive and power. Always a stringent self-critic, he considered it unfinished, and it was not published until 1978, 21 years after his death. It deals with the Civil War and with his imprisonment, a period that saw the end of O’Malley’s career as an active revolutionary. His politics remained ...”