“... of white supremacy. The atmosphere in the town is one of preserved time; too content and self-satisfied with its sense of liberality, it denies the history of New England while seeming to embrace it. It seeks to draw visitors into a cocoon of English colonial history, memorialising the arrival and settlement in 1639 of a band of Puritans under the ...”

“... he’s very generous, helping friends down on their luck, dispensing large sums without fuss or self-congratulation. He’s always funny, and the book hasn’t diminished my admiration for his style or his industry, though it’s hard to envy him his back pain, his sometimes disastrous women and his two marriages. I like the sound of his brother, Sandy, his ...”

“... and claiming that she wrote it when she was drunk. Freud speculated that writers turn the crude, self-aggrandising materials of daydreams into literature. Rereading L’Amant, I can’t help thinking that it contains a good deal of ego-boosting romantic fantasy. A ravishing, sexually magnetic impoverished young woman lords it over a rich lover, half-mad with ...”

“... gold reserves, actually) to finance imports of consumer goods during the turbulent transition to a self-sustaining economy seem implausible – cautious leaders would hardly use this high-risk strategy. There are additional difficulties. Political culture – a factor as important as it is elusive – might prove an obstacle. The double reform will not succeed ...”

“... make sense of complex or problematic novels or poems is to read them with a mind unburdened by the self-denying ordinances of modern critical dogma.’ But of course there are other forms of prejudice. Problems arising from arguments about truth and prejudice were to lead to noisy arguments about Donne. I believe firmly that Empson was a great critic, but have ...”

“... of the revolution. Unemployed, indeed largely unemployable, given to all manner of anti-social and self-destructive behaviour, and filled with an incoherent rage and bitterness, they provide a potential constituency for the radical populists of the PAC and the ANC Left. The most publicised members of this latter group are Harry Gwala, the Natal ANC-SACP ...”

“... or moral superiority, just genuine lack of interest. I wish it would all go away. Sickened by the self-righteousness of the newspapers, which, though it takes a different form, is as nauseating in the Independent as it is in the Sun. Depressed too by the continuing corruption of public life, ex-members of the Government moving straight onto the boards of the ...”

“... head of the introductory matter to the second OED, with its import prominently displayed in the self-lauding publicity material, Schäfer soberly remarks: The increasing discrepancy between the methods used at that time [i.e., when OED was compiled] and those used now for evaluation calls for a detailed analysis of the nature and reliability of the OED ...”

“... in a few days’ time. Only at that stage did it emerge that Ms Roberts was so full of naive self-belief that she really did think she would win, and wouldn’t hear a word more of this defeatist talk. She lost by 13,600. The second point is far more significant. Young notes that Mrs Thatcher has developed a close relationship with the large Jewish ...”

“... expectation to demoralisation, all in one night.’ Sari Nusseibeh chooses his words carefully, self-consciously, perhaps even politically, searching for accuracy, but also considering the effect they will have. We are sitting in the exquisite reception room of his mother’s house on the Nablus road in East Jerusalem almost a month after his release from ...”

“... had anything to say about democracy in Croatia today, I missed it. Was he wisely shunning the self-righteousness which expects politics to be more ethical in small new states than big old ones? Or was he loath to spoil the clear Parisian outlines of the utopia he was sketching, a utopia of authentic patriotism? Krleza would not, one suspects, have been ...”

“... is because of the density of what he knows about Byron. McGann himself, as one of a new breed of self-critical critics, would presumably like this difficulty brought up and pondered on. Those of us who argue that we should like to democratise criticism, and write in order to be understood by A-Level students, are in the same difficulty as Emma ...”

“... for anything useful, mainly because anybody who could submit himself to such absolutism had to be self-selectingly obsequious. But nowadays you can build an impregnable career out of polite waffle. If Professor Booth wants to be worried about something, he should worry about that. He should turn his attention to the sociology of academicism. Nobody objects to ...”

“... the Tiers Livre we laugh at Panurge because he is mad: a man possessed by the devil, dominated by self-love and sliding down the slope of melancholy mania into stupor. In the Tiers Livre the scheme is far more complex than in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. Both worldly and Christian fools seem comic, until Rabelais turns the tables on us. For Rabelais there are ...”

“... great a leap from Utopia to Science’ remains strikingly heretical in the context of his self-imposed isolation from an entire range of (economic) facts relevant to the theory and practice of Marxism, and hence to the discrimination of its functions, malfunctions and alleged breakdown. In expressing his disquiet about the too-great leap, Bloch ...”