“... those who did not understand their consequences and were often most effective when at their most self-serving. The decline of Yeltsin nevertheless coincided – until this year – with the stabilisation of the economy, the transfer of an extraordinary proportion of Russia’s industry into private (if often corrupt) hands, the establishment of a vigorous ...”

“... against Schoenbaum’s apparent relativism is accompanied by a sense that if his more visibly self-conscious precursor erred, it was actually on the side of sentiment. On the few occasions when Honan finds reason to correct Schoenbaum (which he does with a quiet but clear satisfaction), it is always to extirpate some residual romantic indulgence. The ...”

“... ladies in faded print dresses. There were several quite senior Army and Navy officers, smart and self-conscious in their dress uniforms. An old man sitting beside me in the gallery looked sternly at my notebook, then asked if I was a Western reporter. When I said I was, he began to talk about his enthusiasm for Pravoye Delo, but added that there were ‘too ...”

“... historic rights (based on the territorial zenith of the medieval Balkan states) nor issues of self-determination were, in the final account, instrumental in delineating frontiers. At the very most, these elements shaped the controversial and incompatible Balkan irredentist programmes. The size, shape, stages of growth, even the very existence of the ...”

“... languages makes it possible for translators to find solutions to hitherto insoluble problems seems self-evident. How could translations into Italian of English novels be the same after Manzoni had written I promessi sposi? How could one not draw on Eliot for a translation of the French Symbolists? Freshly arrived in England, Voltaire much enjoyed an afternoon ...”

“... sculling on the Neckar was another Englishman. But in spite of all the defects, the emotional self-indulgence, the melancholy (after all, he lost two wives whom he liked), the meanness to his daughters (Virginia reckoned he spent about £300 on her education), he still emerges as ‘an adorable man, and somehow tremendous’. It is Virginia Woolf’s ...”

“... to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up to then’. Why such essentially vain self-criticism? And if Pynchon really does feel so deprecatory, if the collection is therefore of mostly historical value, then by what critical scruple did he choose to omit the only other story he has published, ‘Mortality and Mercy in ...”

“... with Bikhu Parekh’s efforts to unravel her political philosophy. Much of it strikes me as rather self-contradictory; and its general purport does not seem to get us very far. She discussed revolution at some length, ignoring classes, economics and even religion. She contemplated writing about Marx, but seems to have shrunk from the creative effort – that ...”

“... French writing on the Revolution, from Michelet onwards, has taken the form of the historian’s self-identification, whether from a Royalist or from a Republican point of view, with the events he was commemorating. As Lefebvre once said of Robespierre, ‘Après tout, c’est mon ami.’ For Furet this is easily understood since French politics, from 1789 ...”

“... imitations of Versailles all across western and eastern Europe. But it was most vivid and most self-conscious in post-revolutionary France: Paris, capital of the 19th century. In Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, Paris was the centre of fashion, of luxury industries, whose Universal Exhibitions were places of pilgrimage for all Europe: the marketplace of ...”

“... modern politics. The government research laboratory is an intermediate social habitat, not quite self-sufficient in its traditions or its mission, lying across the boundary between the very different domains of academia and the Civil Service. The sociologists of science have given their attention to its academic characteristics: in what way is it an ...”

“... Culture has to admit, is that many Elizabethan authors wrote books specifically appealing to the self-consciousness of merchants and craftsmen ... Thus, even if there was no large middle class such as Wright described, there were bourgeois hero-tales, and there were tradesmen who could read them.’ (Wright’s sin seems to have lain only in seeing the ...”

“... takes over? At this point our sociologist-historian-critic must surely wish to intervene with a self-satisfied Holmes-to-Watson smile: ‘Stylus virum arguit. Style shows a fellow up. I am sure you must have noted, my dear Watson, that every writer has his own catchwords or bosswords. Take Yeats. I was reading his Wind among the Reeds last night. I found ...”

“... into the 19th century – it seems to have been, like Blind Harry’s Wallace, something which no self-respecting Scots household was complete without. This popularity has caused modern scholars some perplexity. It is not that early readers of the poem knew something about it that we don’t, to judge from the parody of 1701 that Jack quotes, in which ...”

“... community, common life, are valued by the hero only so far as they are able to sustain the true self in the secrecy it needs. To the extent that we decide that Chekhov and his hero resemble each other, we can be sure biographers will never reach the truth about his relations with women. As Yegorushka’s double vision of Solomon indicates, romance in ...”