“... to turn the figure round: it’s difficult to name anyone who has had more influence on British self-understanding than Tom Nairn. It’s more than forty years since The Break-Up of Britain was published. Its presentation of the United Kingdom as an archaic, dysfunctional structure, pre-modern in its foundation and unfit to survive in a post-imperial ...”

“... status acquired in public service leveraged for private gain. With their lofty commentary and self-promotion, they seem more likely to intensify than to counter cynicism about and distrust in our institutions. It’s not that the distrust isn’t merited, but that the leisurely dad gab (‘It’s an opportunity for me to talk boringly about things like ...”

“... Being a species with no fur, scales or feathers, oddly disposed hair and unique self-consciousness about our sexual parts, we turn to clothes. Clothes, by clinging, squeezing, covering, exposing, draping and padding, by following the body here and billowing away from it there, by making what is round straight, what is soft firm and what is dull bright, offer a critical commentary on the flesh beneath ...”

“... would make his literary reputation. The descendant of non-practising German Jews and of a Swedish self-converted Jewish grandfather, Nelson Algren Abraham grew up among the Chicago Catholic working class and not in an immigrant Jewish community. Although he dropped the name Abraham in the Forties, inside his tough guy persona was a Jewish boy – like the one ...”

“... that part of it, in particular, which is premised on conceptions of the divided or multiple self and can be referred to as the literature of romantic duality. One of the books is fiction – of a kind, however, which is often investigated for its affinity to fact; while the other records the facts and feelings and constructions of the biographer of a ...”

“... here who ‘had not turned to Christ’. His message scathed me like a searchlight. With the self-consciousness of adolescence, it was always I who had not turned to Christ. The fear produced slyness, or suspicion. I noted that no sick person was ever healed of anything, despite the laying on of hands, the prayers. Indeed, one of the kindest and gentlest ...”

“... sanity with one of his friends leading to Nietzsche’s hospitalisation in 1889. Burckhardt’s self-deprecation may not always have been in earnest, but he was modest enough to see that the philosopher’s effusiveness had crossed a line. ‘There is nothing in the world I fear more,’ he wrote, ‘than being overestimated.’ Reading Greek Cultural ...”

“... stabilisation of a wretchedly abused and fractured society seems extraordinarily illogical, even self-defeating. Commentators seeking to make sense of it are now filling the bookstores with volumes devoted to the American ‘empire’. But how appropriate is this evocative term? Michael Mann has been working for two decades as ‘a historical sociologist on ...”

“... of her husband are at present the only substantial sources of information about her. Female self-assertion was not especially prized in the claustrophobic academic world of the 1930s and 1940s – least of all when conjoined with unladylike frankness. Though difficult to live with, her furies seem to have coexisted with a certain majesty and ...”

“... children.’ And pessimists are even sillier, with their ‘odd apocalyptic panics’ and ‘self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions’. In any case, neither Anthropocene nor Capitalocene leaves room for all the other species with which anthropos shares the planet. The omission, Haraway believes, ‘saps our ...”

“... being, sublate his will into a necessity that governs accident and ordains significance. His old self will fall away, together with the vexation of innumerable wearying claims on his attention by contingent beings whom love has not so justified, and he will be saved, perhaps even deified. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall ...”

“... dependent on the generosity of the girls’ half-brother, John. But John’s weak gestures towards self-respect are cumulatively beaten down by his rapacious wife. This finely lethal scene fills the second chapter of the book, a chapter universally admired though often called strictly irrelevant, like Margaret. As a number of critics have pointed out, the ...”

“... Nuremberg trials, Lord Shawcross, was writing the other day, in the tone of those who state the self-evident, since when other voices have echoed him, ‘to insist on the surrender of Saddam to be tried for his crimes.’ I am all for getting rid of the malodorous Saddam, but would trying him for his crimes of war, however monstrous these have ...”

“... points’. To the Argentinian naturalist Francisco Muñiz Darwin writes both sympathetically and self-interestedly: I cannot adequately say how much I admire your continued zeal, situated as you are without means of pursuing your scientific studies and without people to sympathise with you, for the advancement of natural history; I trust that the pleasure ...”

“... the candidates of the Left. Dalton sulked, but Morrison made a shrewd and emollient speech against self-gratifying Conference resolutions which failed to impress working-class voters. Crossman himself was booed for confessing his intention to drop the ‘very lively and fiery things’ he had planned to say before he knew of his election. The main contribution ...”