“... Place, and revenge our Quarrels upon him. A very ordinary Microscope shows us, that a Louse is it self a very lousy Creature. At times we are almost into Johnsonian thinking: ‘A Man who confines his Speculations to the Time present, has but a very narrow Province to employ his Thoughts in’ (# 152). It is well-known that the Tatler started off with some ...”

“... have been brought into operation at the end of the European war had it not been for Sinn Fein’s self-defeating violence. On this version of history, the 1916 Rising and the subsequent IRA campaign diverted the country from a clear and agreed path to peace and hurtled it down a bloody cul-de-sac. My own pleasure at the Republic of Ireland’s present-day ...”

“... from the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Wiesenthal Center and self-respecting bookshops have boycotted it. I haven’t seen a copy anywhere: even survivalist bookshops seem to have run out. If you want The Turner Diaries and don’t want to buy an Uzi at the same time, mail order is still the easiest way to get it. The ...”

“... of pre-payment meters, fed by coins, tokens or smart cards. The consequence has been widespread ‘self-disconnection’. A study by the Joseph Rowntree Trust found that pre-payment meters result in people cutting down on cooked meals and baths. The most serious consequences of fuel poverty are obscured by the statistics: only 186 people died of hypothermia in ...”

“... austere traditions of the Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideals and the art-forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles.’ But the ‘bourgeois’ limitations were also national. Elites might imaginatively reconfigure themselves along transnational ...”

“... of the Earth were set out in that piece: population pressure, the death of the nation-state, the self-service style of Third World government, influx into the cities and ‘a pre-Modern formlessness’ in remote, late 20th-century battlefields about which no one cares but the protagonists. Cantering through this slow-motion apocalypse were two new ...”

“... from politics, but it turned out that this could not be done, at least by him. He wanted self-government for Ireland, but was sure that more than that was needed if the new Ireland were not to be demoralised. This conviction had political implications. ‘It may well be that Ireland will have to become irreligious or unpolitical even, before she can ...”

“... can be called that, is a chastening example of how an excess of piety can imperceptibly turn into self-aggrandising ...”

“... Reputation became more mysterious, as makers, observers, critics and collectors formed into self-sustaining coteries. Reproduction has since enlarged the membership of such groups to the point where many species of Modernism have become popular, dominant even. But mere dissemination cannot magically re-assemble a single art of painting, or re-create the ...”

“... good financial sense and economy of space. The fact that it was empty only underlined the folly of self-indulgence into which my uncle had descended. To look, stooping slightly, from the deep-set windows onto the terrace and beyond it the river at the foot of a sloping expanse of grass, was to understand why ‘normal behaviour’ would in any case be ...”

“... be something to be said for McLuhan’s way of doing and saying things: that his concealments and self-deceptions and errors were almost necessary to getting the truth, or its possibility, across. And one can’t help thinking he would have enjoyed the computer-generated stock-market collapse last October. Communications satellites were not yet ...”

“... greatest story-teller’, an entertaining interviewee, a value-for-money guest on talk-shows. Self-help, patriotism and the game for the game’s sake are his constant themes. Mrs Thatcher overcomes doubts about his ‘judgment’ and appoints him the Party’s deputy chairman. Then the second disaster: he offers £2000 to a prostitute so that she may go ...”

“... passions, carrying on, in much altered but no less fruitful form, the psychoanalytic tradition of self-analysis. Hobson, though, is too well-trained a scientist to rest his case for the activation-synthesis model on anecdotal interpretations of individual dreams. He and his colleagues have sought to make dream analysis a genuine science. Over the past ...”

“... to be a pilot on the Mississippi, are what one might expect from an intelligent, highly literate, self-educated young man, who already knows what will make a good story in the local paper. They are rather sober, a bit like travel journalism, which, indeed, some of them became when his brother Orion published them in his newspaper. One lectures solemnly on the ...”

“... at least as a realist but I would say also as a stylist, been running on empty ever since. His self-esteem tank, in bold contrast, has been filled to overflowing. As he instructed us all, in ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’, No one was ever moved to tears by reading about the unhappy fates of heroes and heroines in ...”