“... by then solicitors. The three men declined to say anything, taking advantage of the rule against self-incrimination so often attacked by the police themselves. Another four months passed before, on 22 November 1990, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the three detectives were to be charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Under ...”

“... gritty but is not instantly intelligible, encompasses the kind of anarchist, anti-authoritarian, self-help, do-it-yourself, William Morrissy, anti-urban, individualistichomemaking that Peter Hall greatly admires. In its original Baltimore setting, it meant virtually giving away run-down and semi-derelict housing to anyone who would rehabilitate it by their ...”

“... to tea-meetings than to studying up his sermons. This community – with its good-heartedness and self-importance, its gorgeous evening-gowns and its substantial food – is vigorously presented and subtly investigated. In the ex-minister’s invalid daughter – the manufacturer of all gossip and the subject of none, whose eyes have ‘something of the ...”

“... opponents of nuclear energy. The nuclear industry blamed its critics for problems that were mainly self-inflicted, if not indeed inherent in the technology. By 1986 nuclear-power programmes throughout the industrial world had slowed almost to a standstill. The reasons were manifold. Electricity use had fallen short of the growth rates anticipated a decade ...”

“... Germans accepted as genuine because they thought they controlled them: ‘the German talent for self-deception’ was gradually enlarged into a genius for perceiving truth in fiction. This isn’t to say that the British were naturally better at this complex game than the Germans. These volumes, notably this one, show that the scales of success and failure ...”

“... tunic. Come, old martyr! What, torment enough is it? Back to my room shall you take your sweet self! Good bye, mother-beetle: husband-eft, sufficit! See the snug niche I have made on my shelf. A’s book shall prop you up, B’s shall cover you, Here’s C to be grave with, or D to be gay, And with E on each side, and F light over you, Dry-rot at ease till ...”

“... transgression, gaiety transfiguring all that dread. Yet Greenblatt, having with whatever degree of self-awareness accomplished the fundamental shift from determinism to a random multiplicity, finds himself faced with a phase of history in which the end seems indeed to be inscribed in the beginning, in which the dice are loaded and all fall one way. There is a ...”

“... incomprehension and distaste’ for the language of ‘further reformation’ spoken by the self-styled ‘godly’ members of the House of Commons. Puritan radicalism, fortified by the King’s intransigence, proved a much stronger incentive to fight for Parliament than the constitutional issues of 1640-2. Yet that was not, Russell suggests, because ...”

“... scholar like Carlyle did in private: ‘A Book is a kind of thing that requires a man to be self-collected. He must be alone with it ... no man can read a Book well with the bustle of three or four hundred people about him! Even forgetting the mere facts which a Book contains, a man can do more with it in his own apartment, in the solitude of one ...”

“... is induction. He is going to argue, he tells us at the beginning, that a style of reasoning is self-authenticating. The idea sounds innocent enough: a proposition can only be assessed as true or false when there is some style of reasoning that sets the questions and provides ways of answering them. We learn that there is no way of settling the truth of a ...”

“... of brooding about America and Europe, the past and the future, art and society, influence and self-reliance, was coming to a head in a gush of discussion. The issues raised by the Regionalists, the Mexican muralists, by the question of abstract art, or by Surrealism, were all pointing in the same direction – towards the definition of a truly American ...”

“... dead, as Bredekamp shows in meticulously observed detail. Flora ignores the rape of her earlier self, which lakes place immediately behind her. And Venus’s gesture of welcome offers no obvious response to the drama at the centre of which she stands. One is almost driven to sympathise with Stephen Spender, who took the painting as an allegory of Venus ...”

“... to change so that I can be against the world’ represents the same posture, but also seems to be self-mocking, more than halfway into irony, since by 1968, when he said this, Genet had shown in all kinds of ways that he wanted the world changed and was ready to help to change it. And even in the midst of his thoroughly indefensible antics, a quirky, elusive ...”

“... that comparative advantage lay. In his classical scheme of things, if everyone pursues his or her self-interest, we end up with the best possible outcome. For those not blessed with that simple faith, what was rational for the individual was not necessarily rational or best for the country. Britain suffered from too much reliance on laissez-faire. The second ...”

“... Onetti’s novels, so that he seems, in casual conversation, to be talking like his most literary self. Perhaps this is how Onetti talks, but the uneven texture of Chao’s book suggests otherwise: that the speaking Onetti and the writing Onetti are quite different. Still, it’s a good performance, however stage-managed. We meet a man who has read ...”