“... cosmopolitan constitution’ and thus ‘towards perpetual peace’.Kant prefaced his essay with a self-deprecating joke, suggesting that ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’ could have been the name of an inn, with a sign depicting a deserted churchyard – a resting place, perhaps, for ‘philosophers who dream a sweet dream of perpetual peace’. The joke wasn’t ...”

“... Marr has written of that whole life’s production – a writing life as strenuous, racked and self-questioning as any gaping aficionado of tortured genius might ask – in ways that support all the sensible things Barthes and Foucault ever said about the conditions and constraints of authorship. Not that Marr, who is a lawyer, an investigative journalist ...”

“... though, the essay tends to be more or less the precise opposite of such a sober and responsible self-examination. The writers who have used the form in the questioning spirit – the essayists, from Montaigne to Stanley Cavell, who generate a sense that the act of writing is for them a genuine process of intellectual exploration – are far outnumbered by ...”

“... of the human good, and its commitment to allow individuals to seek their own salvation or self-realisation provided they do not interfere with the same freedom of others. Unlike those French secularists who forbid Muslim girls to wear head-scarves to school, true liberals are reluctant to interfere even with anti-liberal cultures in their midst. This ...”

“... banned writers in an article on censorship. For some reason, Jack Whelan gave his new nationalised self a half-Irish, half-English moniker that would become, with time, entirely appropriate. Thus rechristened, O’Faolain did all the things an ambitious half-poor young man should do. He joined the IRA. He took to speaking Gaelic with a will. He spent his ...”

“... submitting to a more insidious censor. And if the wresting of autonomy from Nature entails self-repression, then the liberated individuals who emerge from this process are, in a woeful paradox, faceless, interchangeable figures drained of all inner richness. From what vantage-point, however, could Horkheimer and Adorno launch these Olympian ...”

“... arms – the Andrew Doria received an official salute. By recognising American independence, a self-serving Dutch colonial governor triggered a major confrontation between Britain and the Netherlands. The British authorities badgered the Dutch, but since the Dutch had allowed their once-formidable Navy to decay, they were in no position to defend national ...”

“... more leisurely, less aggressive colloquialism. Enright’s refusal to acknowledge art as a self-justifying absolute – as Larkin did, whatever his protestations to the contrary – is crucial to what might be called the social dimension of Enright’s poetry: its genial, raconteurish tone, its willingness to negotiate with foreign countries and ...”

“... Labour Party – as it was intended to. It was also a public admission that the Party had lost the self-confidence – the belief that, whatever the electorate thought, the future was on its side – which had sustained it from 1918 until the early Eighties. Mr Blair has done what Hugh Gaitskell failed to do and what no other Labour leader has even ...”

“... of financial and commercial control. It mattered because of the felt need to assert identity, self-worth and independence. It was not surprising that professionalism rapidly took hold, and that in 1895 a large body of Northern clubs seceded from the Rugby Football Union to establish what became the separate code of rugby league. The Southern clubs could ...”

“... of good will’; ‘a little unpopular with the other boys, who regard him as rather boastful and self-important’; ‘I much admired his fighting spirit in the boxing’ (here too, perhaps, the dandy’s liking for a dressing-gown); ‘splendid work’ with the Combined Cadet Force. Chatwin may have been a butterfly but he was also something of a ...”

“... gliding between his exotic physiognomy and his deeply conservative and anti-physical inner self, gives romanticism a strange name: Young England. Byron, embracing the hilarity and misjudgments of the erotic life, leaves England behind. Disraeli is no less interesting than Byron, but something of the emptiness of his sexual pose is illustrated in the ...”

“... it was ‘somewhat too composed ... for me to accept it as a direct cry from the heart’. This self-legitimising complaint sits rather oddly in Hamilton’s mouth, since he admits that his own letter to Salinger had been ‘completely disingenuous’, and that he’d deliberately phrased it in a way which he imagined his subject would ‘heartily ...”

“... work of the highest originality. It is typical of Wright’s need to present himself as uniquely self-made that he was cagey about admitting influences – Sullivan apart. Gill’s book is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 ...”

“... he discerned in his wife’s personality and the texture of their marriage. In equal parts self-deprecating and self-assured, emotional but not sentimental, intimate but not indiscreet, his voice is so trustworthy that it is impossible not to believe him. That’s why the few moments when he admits that the fog might ...”