“... between China and the West are a constant source of instruction. An a-moral struggle for self-preservation sounded as discordant a note for Confucianism as it had for much of Christendom. If only Wallace had entered China, with his transference of struggle from intra- to inter-specific competition, how even more Chinese would he have ...”

“... Bert, a man who was able to take and to give pleasure – a fine portrait, which is also a self-portrait, of a second father. Bert’s testimony, and Ilse’s, are probably paramount. ‘The image you give,’ Fraser tells Ilse, meaning the image she gives of him, as a boy (the ‘you’s’, ‘she’s’ and ‘he’s’ can be taxing), ‘is one of ...”

“... a political world considered to be irredeemably fallen and inauthentic. Few critics have been as self-consciously royalist as Eliot; the republic of letters has been established under a figurehead monarchy. But something of the old notion that public affairs – notably defence policies – are mysteries of state still persists. And English poetry is still ...”

“... middle of the night, often on quite trivial matters. The author suggests this reflected a lack of self-confidence in domestic affairs but strongly denies that it was a sign of weakness. Once again, the evidence seems very much against him. Eden was desperately over-sensitive to press hostility and to taunts of appeasement from the Suez Group, and some of his ...”

“... George Eliot’s best woman friend, is the perfect choice. She combined in her idiosyncratic self all the factors needed for a feminist of that time: she was wealthy, independent, middle-class, educated, radical, married – but to a French eccentric who let her go her own way – and childless. Her background was nonconformist in two senses. She was one ...”

“... volumes and the modern-spelling collection, despite the absence of apparatus and the continual self-advertisement, can hold their own against most opposition. The raison d’être of the old-spelling collection is doubtful: for defences of its silent alterations and for readings at present lacking any explanatory support we shall have to wait for the ...”

“... morality, less oppressive than the existing one and juster in that it put the general good before self and loved ones – though this last precept may have borne hard on their children. Holcroft’s 16-year-old son and Godwin’s 22-year-old stepdaughter Fanny Imlay both committed suicide after running away from home. Godwin made his own daughter Mary Shelley ...”

“... His gaucherie was itself charming. He was to reach an eminence almost beyond criticism, and beyond self-criticism too. With great fame, he grew somewhat snobbish and reactionary. Martin, who gives admirable accounts of Tennyson’s houses at Farringford and Aldworth, deftly points up the parallel between the aging poet and his extraordinary cousin Charles, an ...”

“... with the Chicago Wobblies of his youth. Rexroth, who was the kind of superb polymath only a self-taught man can be, read enormously widely, and his conversation was full of haphazard erudition, scientific, philological, historical, metaphysical, as well as literary. Out of this reading he developed a sense that all the world’s cultures were in a way ...”

“... as they were by the Inquisitors. ‘Some of us think she is crazy,’ remarked one woman of the self-declared benandante Florida Basili. Few seem to have had an established place in the community. Most were poor, some destitute or women afflicted by domestic problems. Even their name, benandanti, seems sometimes to have become conflated with ...”

“... His great rag-bag of sources hangs around him like an albatross. He is a sort of caricature of a self-taught Victorian wallowing in a confused mass of science and religion, and he is well-instructed in neither. He is at his happiest when the poet takes over, as in ‘The Innumerable Christ’ (in Sangshaw), a sort of Space project which sees Christs ...”

“... of factor VIII may be concentrated from as many as twenty thousand donors. Britain may soon be self-sufficient in factor VIII: a definite advance, since the incidence of AIDS in Britain is relatively low (31 cases reported by the beginning of this year). The fact, welcome or unwelcome, appears to be that chastity among homosexuals is on the increase. One ...”

“... are damaging: for any realistic forecast must be gloomy, and gloomy forecasts are apt to be self-fulfilling. They believe that the way to minimise damage to the university system is to carry on all our activities as usual, and to react to external pressures as little and as late as possible: that policy will avoid unnecessary sacrifices, and may lead to ...”

“... need in the free-market societies of the 21st century will not be confined to those that seemed self-evident in the 18th and 19th. They will include environmental and social rights which have little meaning as a topic for one person’s litigation against the state, because they do not concern state interference with personal autonomy. That classic liberal ...”

“... fils, beside him in the grave. The story is that of a famous prostitute, doomed by TB, redeemed by self-sacrifice, repentant of her sins, converted to the Catholic Church on her death-bed. It runs parallel in many ways with the story of Tannhäuser, who sought forgiveness from the Pope after escaping from the spell of Venus – except that Tannhäuser is ...”