“... the other side of arcane and seemingly pointless disputes are struggling with the question of what self-image it would be best for human beings to have. So it is with the dispute about truth that has been going on among the philosophy professors ever since the days of Nietzsche and James. That dispute boils down to the question of whether, in our pursuit of ...”

“... the family with keeping the nobility at a distance; and he endorses a widely held view that a self-interested, obdurately entrenched nobility was the Achilles’ heel of the regime. The secret of Charlemagne’s success, however, was to mobilise family and elite at the same time, thereby securing their more or less harmonious coexistence within the ...”

“... to the glories of diction not the mysteries of charisma, the discipline of repertory not the self-immolation of the single performance. He directed and lectured, recorded albums of Shakespeare, did films, television; but the English stage was Gielgud’s echo-chamber for seventy years, and he is centrally responsible for the English sense of a national ...”

“... great case for rationality, for the necessary and moral correction of error – think of Emma’s self-abasements when she realises how poorly she has read her world – while simultaneously undermining the grounds of that rationality by showing that the quest for transparency is in fact driven by cloudy desire. Is this a contradiction or a paradox? Can ...”

“... persistence, or endurance of spirit, and to a passion for descriptive specificity when it comes to self-adornment: what some call style. Cunningham, who died in 2016 at 87, was celebrated for the weekly photo essays he published for decades in the New York Times: ‘On the Street’ was an exquisite exercise in public pattern recognition, and ‘Evening ...”

“... to dream away his power to change things, and restores reality to something like its old flawed self.‘I have never written a plot-driven novel,’ Le Guin said. ‘I admire plot from a vast distance, with unenvious admiration. I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t.’ She tended to write stories which include long journeys that loop back ...”

“... ambivalent sort of independence, and so ended up alienating everyone. Legitimists accused him of self-interest, while the new government doubted his loyalty. He found himself socially ostracised and professionally stuck, working as an ‘obscure assistant judge’ while his contemporaries rose through the magistracy. America provided a way out. Under the ...”

“... of leader it is because he has tapped a deep well of left-wing anti-liberalism. His combative and self-assured tone helps. A characteristic example of his provocative style is his claim, made after Trump won the presidency in 2016, that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans were being ‘hysterical’ when they saw Trump as a danger to democracy, since ...”

“... broadly than almost anyone working in the Marxist tradition ever has’: since labour is an act of self-realisation, however alienated under capitalism, individuals are evaluated on the basis of their actions. What is of value in any society, whatever the mode of production, will be judged according to the imaginative and ethical principles guiding communal ...”

“... at ease in the world of modern research. He laments the imprisonment of historical study within self-enclosed and necessarily un-comparative specialisms. Because historical study can never be ‘value-free’, he is on distant terms with the moral agnosticism, or moral abstention, of the doctoral belt. Because historical study can only have worth, and ...”

“... as though obligatorily with what was by now Byron’s literary signature, his morose and tormented self-projection as the poem’s ‘hero’. But the context is contemporary Europe, pacified and carved up by the victorious Allies after the collapse of the Napoleonic empire. Against the backdrop of this new conservative dispensation, the motifs of Childe ...”

“... interest in thinkers, mostly of the Stoic tradition, who have promoted the rival virtues of self-sufficiency, she writes to call attention to those who preach and practise sympathy. These philosophers and novelists expand the limits of association a society takes for granted, and by doing so extend the possibilities of reform, and their commentator ...”

“... and Common Sense’ and ‘On Depth and Superficiality’’ and the demolition of the theory of self-interest and identity in the Principles of Human Action. But that is the best-kept secret about Hazlitt: he is a hard thinker, with an intricacy not imposed by the usual stratagems – officious jargon, protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic ...”

“... are virtual transcriptions (with a Nietzschean accent) of words of Emerson’s. In Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’ there is a pair of sentences I have previously had occasion variously to cite and interpret: ‘The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.’ I will merely assert here that Emerson ...”

“... autobiography, for instance, he chose not to recount his life directly but to project a diffused self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily ...”