“... parts were already experiencing what Sir Richard Southern has referred to as ‘that moment of self-generating expansion for which economists now look so anxiously in underdeveloped countries’. Equally, it is highly likely that in England, Germany, perhaps Denmark, and even Ireland (though Hodges would hardly admit as much), this process was intimately ...”

“... a climber seeking more difficult pitches, or a mystic trying for more complete forgetfulness of self, Irwin has looked for a way of making works of art which deal with perception, but not with things perceived. Redness that is not a red thing, but redness pure and simple. An art which points at, but does not transform its subject-matter. Sometimes he seems ...”

“... psychotic’, ‘your whore’, ‘your psychotic whore’, ‘your adulterous slut’, ‘a self-serving ignorant slut’, ‘a lying slut’, ‘dishonest, ignorant, and tasteless’. Mrs Harris remarks of her: ‘Her voice is vomitous to me.’ Yet such is Mrs Harris’s travail that she cannot perceive that these terms might change the doctor’s ...”

“... pleasure of tranquillity, and the peace of the religious life may have seemed to her an exquisite self-indulgence.’ I doubt it. She probably felt more like Héloïse. In ‘The Abiding Vision’ Rebecca West treats the theme with the utmost ambivalence. Lily the showgirl seems to businessman Sam Hartley, and through his eyes to us, to have the sort of ...”

“... paper on the SLA version of radical feminism’ and ran her own gun classes. Presumably it was the self-confidence that followed from this which enabled her to start thinking about a return to civilian life. When she told the others that she felt like jacking it in, they were shocked. ‘You can’t do that,’ they said, or she says they said: ‘You’re a ...”

“... abstractions. Indeed he did not have a real visual world, as he did not have a real visual self. He could speak about things, but did not see them face-to-face. Hughlings Jackson, discussing patients with aphasia and left-hemisphere lesions, says they have lost ‘abstract’ and ‘propositional’ thought – and compares them with dogs ...”

“... twenty-five years, in a bloodless decimation that is none the less cruel for that. During his self-addressed discourse Garcia Marquez twice mentioned the word ‘solitude’ and at least once quoted in full his by now famous title. It seemed as if he had not only invented the ‘concept of solitude’ (thus dismissing the autumn of Petrarch), but also the ...”

“... so, he involves himself (the implication is, through no fault of the author’s) in a startling self-contradiction. A story like this is, of course, a gift to the semiotician. Professor Eco uses it to introduce the latest (and most fashionable) developments in modal logic – in particular, the theory of possible worlds. The result scarcely makes sense, and ...”

“... agnostics and atheists among my acquaintance, however, found the novel rather sad. All that self-denial and sacrifice of libido depressed them. I think it would depress me, too, now, if I didn’t know that my principal characters would have made a sensible decision long ago to avail themselves of contraceptives.’ I will always have a special fondness ...”

“... document, but time will not make it more interesting, and it would be a pity to apply a self-imposed Thirty Year Rule. From 1951 onwards, as the Shuckburgh diary shows, Eden had become very impatient about the succession – and with good reason. After the last Cabinet of the 1945 ‘Caretaker’ Administration Churchill said to him: ‘Thirty years ...”

“... a hummocky common of gorse and bracken’. Yet amidst all the tawdriness of this new Britain, the self-satisfaction of the English manages somehow to persist: in the routine insincerities which pass for conversation at the Royal St Cadix Yacht Club, and in television soap operas like An Englishman’s Home – snobbish, unfunny and parochial. George fails in ...”

“... seriousness of one who has thought long and fairly deeply. The writing could not be said to show self-knowledge or wisdom, perhaps, and Eisenstein admits this, admits, even, its ‘completely shameless narcissism’: but, alertly translated by Eisenstein’s former student Herbert Marshall, it is a convincing demonstration of Baudelaire’s idea that ‘the ...”

“... Jakobson’s temptation, which is that of all structuralism, is towards anonymity and towards a self-sufficient system which tolerates but hardly seems to need human operatives. Where Jakobson favoured the closed literary form of the poem, as the most comfortable place to work, Bakhtin went to the other extreme – to the novel, construed by him as the form ...”

“... President Carter’s DCI, Stansfield Turner, records that ‘British intelligence remains very self-conscious about its past.’ In 1979 Jim Callaghan asked Turner: ‘Do you trust us again?’ Turner ‘gave him an answer that I hope was somewhat reassuring, but still not too positive. I did have reservations.’ Mr Laqueur’s analysis of the uses and ...”

“... believer in Dissent and natural right, but because he was siding with the believers out of pure self-interest. Tucker wanted Britain to declare the colonies independent, whether they wished to leave or not; he took seriously the thought that America would soon become more populous and more powerful than the mother country, and that the seat of empire might ...”