“... 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 ...”

“... difficulty is compounded by her subject’s reluctance to reveal anything whatsoever of her inner self, whether in conversation, letters, diaries or autobiography. Her memoirs, Black Beech and Honeydew, should, she later remarked, have been called ‘Other People’, and her editor at Collins describes it as ‘pretty dull, largely because of her ...”

“... and Hazlitt all this has gone out the window. At their hands the essay becomes an autonomous, a self-justifying genre; it is now literature. That is, it serves no ulterior purposes, performs no public function. Self-justifying means self-regarding. And where Charles Lamb is ...”

“... It was as if he had seen the world till now, not through his own eyes, out of some singular self, but through the eyes of a fellow who was always in company, even when he was alone; a sociable sell, wrapped always in a communal warmth that protected it from dark matters and all the blinding light of things, but also from the knowledge that there was a ...”

“... meditative mill. What he aims to do is tell us the meaning of our times by placing them in a self-consciously Hebraic perspective. The Christians and (more especially) the Muslims have taken over the post-1989 act. Time, therefore, for the Jews to fight their own corner. Whet it comes to prophecy they can still take on the rest of the world. The result ...”

“... in them herself. So her lack of education was no great disadvantage, and for an autocratic and self-centred woman she was a remarkably good listener. She was, however, inordinately jealous. D’Alembert’s defection to the Lespinasse establishment was seen as an unforgivable act of perfidy: had she not won him membership of the Académie Française after ...”

“... piece of characterisation, both historically and psychologically plausible in his altruistic self-importance and rationalistic crankiness. Kellogg’s principles for ‘biologic living’ involved strict vegetarianism, teetotalism and sexual abstinence, combined with exercise, hydrotherapy, phototherapy and frequent colonic irrigation. None of the ...”

“... drinking, working, playing and the sheer ebullience of success, London remained all his life the self-made undergraduate, working his way through the college of manly experience and always ready for further deeds of initiation. His personality is far more sympathetic than Hemingway’s, though he has none of Hemingway’s unerring originality as a ...”