“... gaze, never to be seen again. Specifically, the party introduces three ‘highly-selected’ and self-made women – all contemporaries at Cambridge in the early Fifties and now middle-aged. One, Alix Bowen, wants to ‘change things’. An evangelical Leavisite, she teaches English to prisoners. Alix buries herself in Northam ‘that figurative Northern ...”

“... preternaturally young, were waved in unison in front of platforms where his current 70-year old self, the black hair turned white and the face turned wrinkled, was appearing in person. The news was his news: if Ceausescu visited a chicken farm, it took precedence over everything else. On the day of the Armenian earthquake Romanian Television led on a ...”

“... Copper once put it, ‘the Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere. Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.’ Considerations of this kind tend to be forgotten once war begins, but one day the swift evolution from Desert Shield through Imminent Thunder to Desert Storm will make a great ...”

“... or subconsciously copied, from his father. There is certainly a streak of valetudinarianism in the self-portrait that emerges almost reluctantly from these generally buttoned-up but sometimes, by contrast, disquietingly confidential pages. It is hard to believe that this is the younger brother of Klaus and Erika Mann, the most way-out of Germany’s ...”

“... who are unhappy but not depressed (‘dysthymics’ in the esoteric language of psychiatry) great self-confidence and the ability to accept rejection without being upset. He supports this claim with a series of case-histories drawn from his own patients. Unfortunately psychiatric case-histories are a modern form of fairy story, whose fallibility is well ...”

“... revolting memories to surge up before my closed eyes, almost burning the closed lids with fiery self-disgust, did I kill a moral nerve? To flinch from such memories, simply suppress them, might have been healthier. Is it right to overcome self-disgust? Well, in any case I learned the trick of it. Nobody told me; I found ...”

“... contributed to their rapid impoverishment. Political activity began with the evolution of economic self-help schemes organised on a communal basis and was hastened by the Jews’ need to defend themselves against the anti-semitic violence accompanying Tsarist repression of liberalism (which culminated in the pogroms of the early 1880s and those following the ...”

“... migration be on a sufficiently formidable scale that the migrants can form a reasonably self-contained social community; second, that the distance from the metropole be vast enough to prevent easy absorption into metropolitan culture. By the end of the 18th century there were no less than 3,200,000 ‘whites’ within the 16,900,000 population of ...”

“... remarks Aviq, putting boiled seal meat on the table. It has been painful to see Kunak. The self-confident hunter, Vietnam vet and union electrician often years back stays home now, at his mother’s expense, nagged by mythological dreams. Kunak has three linked fixations. These are that the new town overlies the site of the ancient, pre-Eskimo shaman ...”

“... when she married Hardy in 1874, she was a mature woman with decided opinions and a strong sense of self-esteem committing herself to a shy but ambitious novelist. Oddly, not one of the letters she wrote before her marriage, or for many years after it, has survived. She would have been far from pleased with Michael Millgate’s speculations on their ...”

“... about La Montez. Past biographers, according to Bruce Seymour, were hoodwinked by one of the great self-inventors in an age of invention – and it would be foolish to have expected anything less of this amazing woman, the Madonna of her day, a star in the firmament of ball-breakers. The clever, spoilt and wilful child of an illegitimate Irish beauty and a ...”

“... Arthur Koestler, however, Galileo was the victim of his own fatal flaws: ‘vanity, jealousy and self-righteousness combined into a demoniac force which drove him to the brink of self-destruction’. According to Stillman Drake, who has devoted a lifetime of research to Galileo, Galileo was a zealot, not for Copernicus but ...”

“... of liberalism itself, but he sees this as little more than a tradition of endless disagreement, a self-congratulatory inconclusiveness. You would scarcely gather that there are liberal traditions that have tried to make ethical sense of modern society in terms of rights and other notions that go a long way beyond consumerism. MacIntyre’s central criticism ...”

“... we accept her assessment of other characters, for example of Presbon, who has ‘the gift of self-deception’, and Akamas, who compensates for his ignorance of human nature by presenting himself as a just man. The voices give us six different analyses of the events leading to Medea’s downfall: taken together they leave the impression that the process ...”

“... come to him for confidential counsel in this delicate area. There may have been a lack of full self-knowledge in such behaviour, but I cannot see that, initially at least, there need have been hypocrisy. Nothing is clearer from the record than the fact of O.B.’s possessing ‘the Socratic gift of maieusis’ that Lowes Dickinson attributes to him. Under ...”