“... confession in modern poetry may have helped condition Birch’s sympathy for the high-minded self-indulgence, the dotty and at times distracted character of much of Ruskin’s later writings. Gillian Beer, in a scintillating, funny and touching contribution to The Sun is God, which concerns Darwin’s work on earthworms and Victorian anxieties about the ...”

“... ideas or policies. If they are Liberals or Conservatives, they are occasionally prone to fits of self-denigration and lament, in which they admit that the clase politica, like the clase dirigente, has failed, that the traditional parties are ideologically-barren disasters, that their multi-class composition is a fatal inhibition, that it would be better to ...”

“... Elish (‘When on high’). Smith’s dedication to this austere branch of study (in which he was self-taught, being by profession an engraver) arose from a passionate interest in the historical books of the Old Testament, and the early advances of Assyriology undoubtedly owed much to its relevance to Biblical study. But scholarly attention soon spread to the ...”

“... It’s doubly shaming – shaming to remember as well, to feel so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people’s purgatory. The only writer I know of who has done justice to the experience is a science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury. He has a 1953 story, ‘The Playground’, where a father makes a pact with the powers of evil in order to ...”

“... Kazakhstan, they have carved out a geographical area for themselves where they practise effective self-government. In the Caucasus, the interwoven skein of little peoples continues to unravel in violence, with uncompromising claims for land and justice – but justice from whom? None of this will ‘solve itself’. Zhirinovsky is the malign child striking ...”

“... die. Dolabella has no sooner gone than Cleopatra actually makes an attempt, on stage, to kill her self (‘Quick, quick, good hands!’) and is instantly disarmed by Proculeius; the Romans, we now learn, are watching like hawks. At V.ii. Cleopatra finally learns, unequivocally, from Dolabella what she has previously suspected, that she will be led in triumph ...”

“... examined their own interests a little more thoughtfully they would surely be delighted at this self-inflicted paralysis on the part of the Government. But one of the most heartening sides of the new South Africa is the lack of such cynicism: people of all races and persuasions, even the most reactionary, want the new government to work. Yet the fact is ...”

“... was a full-scale dock strike. He was calm but disappointed. Later, sharing with me a moment of self-reproach, he said he regretted not having ‘winged’ one of them. ‘Then the rest would have pretty quickly toed the line.’ He had been in similar situations before. He went back on board and I followed. I explained to the officer of the watch that I ...”

“... observing the clash of opposites is historically sanctioned in common law systems, but it is not self-evident. Other legal systems function without obvious injustice by giving the court itself a proactive and investigative role in which the parties are listened to but the witnesses are the court’s and the procedure is a function of the court’s ...”

“... beautifully inexpressive. It meant that he could work at his writing without the painful risks of self-revelation. From this one texte-genèse he claims that he was able to derive the whole of his Impressions d’Afrique, though neither of the key sentences occurs verbatim in that 300-page book. What they gave him was first a plot and then a literary ...”

“... tracks. In later life – civil servant that he was – he rarely if ever committed his private self to incriminating paper. One result is that we know absolutely nothing of his sexual life other than that he married. And his wife Rose is as elusive a personage as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Super is reduced to dredging up passages from Doctor Thorne and ...”

“... Johnson’s account, the wilful refusal of optical amelioration was the prime cause of Swift’s self-isolation. ‘Having thus excluded conversation, and desisted from study, he had neither business nor amusement; for having by some ridiculous resolution or made vow, determined never to wear spectacles, he could make little use of books in his later ...”

“... know hawk from handsaw?) Why need we wait three hundred years for the vindication of a judgment so self-evident in the present? On other matters, O’Brien is not even this temperate. He worries about the future of Britain without a Crown and says, in full chiliastic mode but with a shorter time-line, that ‘I doubt whether the monarchy can survive until the ...”

“... in the hope of winning was a tiresome affair and the woes of the poet show as much exasperation as self-pity. Occasionally they are played for laughs in the spirit of the good clown (‘le bon follastre’), one of the ways Villon imagined he would be remembered, whereupon complaint gives way to bathos. In the inscription, he urges a commemorative verse to be ...”

“... these couples co-owned her Hyde Park cottage.) Recovering her vocation, Eleanor Roosevelt gained a self: engagement with the world liberated her from romantic exclusivity and claustrophobic domesticity. When FDR once asked his supper guests to name four outstanding political leaders, himself choosing Franklin, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and an obscure adviser ...”