“... liberals end up as gallant losers because they don’t have the killer instinct, they’re too self-defeatingly nice. Macleod, like Bobby Kennedy, was that rare thing, a tough-minded liberal, willing to get his hands dirty to do the right thing and win: it was one of the reasons he was a Tory. Such people do not get to the very top but they are more ...”

“... the British economy in an afternoon, by miscalculating the new tax ... this simply illustrates the self-importance to which ministers are susceptible.’ But it doesn’t: you could buy fleet after fleet of new battleships with the money the PRT brought pouring in. Nor has Tommy Balogh (who died in 1985) yet had the credit he deserved: he is now chiefly ...”

“... are the experience itself. Winckelmann’s first-person cannot therefore escape extraneous self-display. Sylvester’s is integral; and it need not be him, it’s any ‘I’. Let that passage stand for many others, equally intensive. ‘Face to face with a Giacometti image, the spectator finds himself as if involved in a reciprocal relationship’; in ...”

“... applauded Nasreen’s outspokenness, but many also deplored what they perceived as her self-promotion, her disregard for journalistic accuracy, and her tendency to denigrate the efforts of other women writers and activists. Older women’s rights advocates disapproved of the ‘softcore’ pornographic quality of much of her writing, which they ...”

“... in a novel that divided its attention more evenly. ‘Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self,’ Vera reflects, in the calm at the end of the book, when she has left white suburbia. She has thrown over the old life, just as the old politics has been overthrown, and in her connection with the land rights activist, who embodies her own hopes as well ...”

“... without being destroyed, gave rise to ever widening splits within the Party and, finally, to its self-immolation in the putsch of August 1991. One is forced to conclude from Yakovlev’s own description of events that the Gorbachev reformers had no idea of the scale of the changes which would follow once they began to tinker with the system. Richard Sakwa ...”

“... Adventist minister, was accused of having sacrificed her child at Ayers Rock. Koresh was a self-confessed sinner with an interest in firearms and a taste for younger women, but in these respects he can hardly be said to differ from many other American males. The evidence that he was a psychopath and a paedophile, as opposed to an unpleasant religious ...”

“... the SACP.’ Faced, however, with ubiquitous evidence that the ANC is bringing to power a rapidly self-enriching black bourgeoisie, many within the Party have begun to doubt the realism of attempting to build socialism via the ANC, but the leadership warns against ‘a narrow, SACP “go it alone” attitude; or, loose, generalising and demoralised ...”

“... dilettanti, well-heeled authors and critics; professional whingers, crypto-communists, self-proclaimed anarchists’ and so on. This animus is never unusual in Glasgow. In fact it’s rather typical there – many of the worlds within Glasgow have spun, and continue to spin, on popular resentments to do with what kind of team you prefer or school ...”

“... agent, the turned man. He has a public persona as ‘Ben Watson’ (apologist for his nocturnal self, the crazed poet), columnist for the Wire, broadcaster, and author of the monumental and magnificent folly, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. Watson, if he wanted to carry his argument outside the poetry ghetto, had to adopt protective ...”

“... theory of cock-up to that of conspiracy, an announcement normally accompanied by a happy smile of self-assurance suggesting that they have just invented this old cliché.) Suffice it to say that Foot does dreadful and detailed damage here to the reputations of a number of leading hacks and that they deserve all they get. It is, however, worth pointing out ...”

“... in general, Bayly argues, British imperial rule became in this period far more authoritarian and self-conscious, just as Britain’s rulers took care to increase their practical and ideological control at home. Both in Great Britain and in its colonies, hundreds of new Army barracks were established between the 1790s and 1820. In both cases, there was a new ...”

“... commitment to Labour politics in the Sixties: intellectuals, he said, must avoid the sort of self-exile to which they had relegated themselves under the last Labour government. During the Fifties, Williams devoted himself essentially to works of literary criticism. Despite the claims made for Williams as a ‘socialist theorist of culture’, most of ...”

“... him to his early sense of what he must give up in order to live, he achieves a brilliant feat of self-understanding. The almost spoken almost gets said in his concluding remarks about love. ‘A perfect love is founded on despair,’ he says, quoting from his sonnets: This paradox is condensed and rhetorical: to get at the truth in it we must expand it a ...”

“... Beach case showed New York criminal justice at its best.’ After a few hundred words of gloating self-congratulation on the Daniel come to judgment theme, the editorial concluded: ‘All over urban America, economic shifts, crime and disintegration of neighbourhoods feed racist fears and reactions. That was the atmosphere in which the Howard Beach tragedy ...”