“... raised with the same nonchalance he had used in setting up a bookie joint or slipping a tail.’ Self-interest is his motive for leaving as for joining the Mob. The difficulty of our taking Henry as a hero in the approved pattern makes for a queasy unfamiliarity in the film’s stance, and reaction to GoodFellas has betrayed confusion and resentment on this ...”

“... had warned the Germans after 1871, a great victory is a great danger. It suspends the faculty of self-criticism. It tempts the beneficiary to ignore the re-appraisals that the less fortunate have embarked on. For most Britons the war taught two lessons: that a nation secure in its identity and cohesion, confident in its history and its mission, can triumph ...”

“... SF fandom: for example, IMHO, meaning ‘in my humble opinion’, and ha ha only serious, which is self-explanatory. True hacker jargon must not be confused with the technobabble employed by suits to impress naive real users. It tends to have the surreal nature: ‘the Moof or dogcow is a semilegendary creature that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh ...”

“... set in London, the alien city to which many Scots were driven by joblessness in the Twenties. The self-consciously brittle tone recalls Lewis’s Apes of God, early Huxley, and Eliot’s young man carbuncular. There are daring-for-the-time references to casual sexual intercourse, Stopesian contraceptive devices, cheap silken undergarments, pick-ups in Lyons ...”

“... it must be admitted, like a card-carrying Fascist, but she did sound like a person of overweening self-confidence and historical naivety. ‘Individual Jews, albeit in quite large numbers, collaborated with Bolshevism. Clearly, the numbers on both sides were great enough for each to think the other primarily responsible for genocide. Since it is the least ...”

“... of the previous war and an undoubted patriot, should have withdrawn into depression, defeatism and self-pitying uselessness as soon as the war started was curious, but Danchev withholds judgment. Others may not feel so well disposed. A chill wind blew over Liddell Hart’s reputation again just after the war, when he had recovered his spirits and, through the ...”

“... no word for understatement. She won prizes but less international recognition than her warm friend Robert Lowell, who consistently celebrated her: Dear Elizabeth, Half New-Englander, half fugitive Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board – Unable to settle anywhere, or live Our usual roaring sublime. Elizabeth Bishop certainly never roared. In this ...”

“... our slippery language is honourable: but when it leads him to such impractical stringencies, it is self-defeating. Moreover, what we call ‘stringencies’ may as well be called, if we shift the focus only a little, ‘self-indulgences’. In some of the earlier and less strenuous essays here, he shows he can recognise with ...”

“... to social discourse, in all spheres of moral life. Such an account of the latitude for self-determination within the grip of the social and the discursive is of some practical moment for current controversy over sexual ethics, simply because history puts paid to the idea that an ethics of sexual behaviour can ever be grounded in empirical claims as ...”

“... now recognise, in G.S. Fraser’s anthology Poetry Now (1956). It appeared again that same year in Robert Conquest’s anthology New Lines, and I fear I did not then recognise in it, as I do now, perhaps the finest poem in that volume, and certainly the most surprising. It is, I suppose and hope, well-known: but it isn’t famous – as it deserves to be. It ...”

“... another voyeur? It was difficult not to see the bombing as retribution for the extraordinary self-promotion that brought the Olympics to Atlanta and, to the consternation even of American journalists, dominated the competition. In violation of Olympic protocol, only the US National Anthem was sung to open the games. Only Americans – Dennis Mitchell ...”

“... for a long time, perhaps for ever.’ Not long afterwards, I go to see Alexander Batanov, a smart, self-confident man in his thirties who has turned himself from an academic researcher into a political consultant. He has worked with Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, and helped engineer a public reconciliation between this wily former bureaucrat turned Mayor ...”

“... Constitution’s language raises such questions but does not provide answers. Nor is the document self-enforcing. Some provisions, like the free speech and equal protection clauses, were violated for decades before being invigorated in the 20th century. Others, like the guarantee of a republican form of government, have been entirely forgotten. During and ...”

“... time, personal and external constraints in behaviour became impersonal and internalised, until self-control, in the form of a new ‘economy of instincts’, became automatic – a process akin to the one Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, when a religiously rooted attitude to work gradually became detached from its ...”

“... somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes’. The Gothic situation is always a self-circularising time-warp from which, however, the reader has broken free, carrying with him, as it were, the now emancipated girl and the radical humanist lifestyle. Terror is cosily isolated, enjoyed because left behind. Politically speaking, there is an ...”