“... 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 ...”

“... of outside powers than its rival across the border. In its decline, indeed, this has become a self-defeating isolation. ‘If autonomy in a positive sense must entail power to do what one wishes and needs to for oneself,’ Paik has drily observed, ‘North Korea must surely be rated as one of the more hampered societies in the present ...”

“... on the energy and assumed benignity of Mayor Luzhkov. Colton writes: ‘Governments with self-control and orderly procedures will be worth influencing: today’s jerry-built and corruptible structures often are not.’ Colton’s is a model narrative. A city emerges from it, at once vital and deeply damaged, more at the mercy of ideologues and ...”

“... year I hope to gain in value. This was the fine clear spirit which Byron, in his unworthy and self-serving exchanges with his fawning friend Hoppner, would describe as Claire’s ‘insolence’. Shelley and his household now left England for the last time. In April they were in Milan and Claire was persuaded the time had come for Allegra to be sent, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and country.” That’s the way of it.’ Father Christopher is offering no comfort at all; he is self-involved. He is speaking his mind, literally. He speaks in the same apparently arbitrary manner as the boy thinks. This use of stream of consciousness would, in later years, become the basis of Chekhov’s innovation in stagecraft. But it is also his ...”

“... boxes. ‘I’m tired of this one,’ she said. ‘Can I have another?’ Cornell, who was usually self-paralysingly sensitive to criticism, calmly wandered off to exchange her box. Some critics have suggested that he started making his shadow boxes to amuse Robert, or that he was influenced by the miniaturised life of Robert’s train set. Deborah Solomon ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... responsibility. A referendum, asking the French and Algerian populations to approve the policy of self-determination, was fixed for 8 January 1961. This was to be followed by the creation of an Algerian executive council and of other bodies to advise on a whole series of important issues. A ceasefire would be announced at the same time and would be matched ...”

“... then, a long line of writers has emulated them, creating a genre which has become increasingly self-conscious and prone to advertise its literary affiliations. It’s a style of writing that lays claim to a certain dignity: it aspires to rise above journalistic opportunism in order to delineate enduring characteristics. Where it once spoke of ‘national ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pasquerel, whom Joan chose as her confessor, had met Joan’s mother on pilgrimage. Joan ‘lacked self-interest’, yet ‘loved display’. She burst into tears when insulted by an English soldier as ‘the whore of the Armagnacs’; yet ‘no one reports a single tear shed either in her cell or under the pressure of the interrogation.’ Gordon is not ...”

“... mythic biography.’ Its mythic qualities make this story, which in many ways defines English self-understanding, more than English. There are recurrent, prefabricated mythic patterns in the Robin Hood corpus, set pieces such as the episode of shooting an arrow into another man’s arrow, which Knight calls both archetypal and phallic. But he fails to ...”