“... not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour.The first and second of these examples assume that Israel, apart from being a Jewish state, is a country like any other and so open only to criticism resembling ...”

“... I pray​ every day that super-intelligent aliens will come to earth and save us from self-destruction, so when an 800-metre-long cigar-shaped object was found to have hurtled into our solar system I felt a stirring of hope. It was picked up on 19 October by the Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) at the University of Hawaii’s Astronomical Institute ...”

“... the book appeared, ‘for I can only call it that.’ In fact it was an instance of the benign self-interest that makes a far-sighted publisher succeed. As poet laureate Betjeman was worth his weight in Bovril. Over its long life John Murray produced not only new books, but whole new genres. The famous red Murray’s handbooks were the original foreign ...”

“... and example. The mother is closer to Mycroft than we might think, and one of her lessons is that self comes first and last, however much we may be tempted by the idea of sacrifice for others. Enola, debating this with herself and us, thinks the advice is often correct, but can’t always be followed. If she followed it, she would have left the marquess to ...”

“... is a theatrical approximation of The Hayes Court Sitting Room, an exploded view of the dandy’s self-enclosing urge to make a world against the world.As with des Esseintes, the point is to retreat into the interior, the better to find yourself elsewhere. The Hayes Court Sitting Room is partly the sitting room of Chaimowicz’s childhood in Paris. In some ...”

“... means. It is, after all, a zombie who is dying, a man who personifies an eerie sacrifice of the self to bureaucracy – or, less sympathetically, the use of bureaucracy as an enduring assertion of a controlling self. And this is why, in Living as in Ikiru, our hero dies a while before the end of the film.There are ...”

“... to the King. He was well-rewarded as a portraitist. Personally he was unprepossessing. This Self-Portrait (1813) sent to his brother in India shows a contained, serious concentration which fits with accounts of an outwardly shy man, who liked better to stand by than to join in. He suffered from periods of depression – one, when he was in his ...”

“... am large, I contain multitudes.’ Contemporaries of the poet picked up something of this self-contradiction, reflected in the fact that Dryden was, it seems, though a silent, withdrawn man, very decidedly loved and hated: sweetly commemorated by Congreve, beaten up verbally and physically by the Duke of Buckingham and others. When the poet Rochester ...”

“... opinion both of himself and of those of whom he approved or disapproved. Though, like other self-fashioners (Petrarch was his chief model among moderns), he altered and suppressed much in his letters when he published them, these letter-collections offer us a contemporary portrait unrivalled in its detail by any other. He found time to expound the ...”

“... background provides an unusual identity-humus. What he likes most about New York is its anonymity. Self-consciously nationalist intellectuals are often susceptible to cosmopolitanism: secretly (or in Said’s case openly) they feel most at home on the neutral terrain of exile and alienation. The very mechanism of identification – ‘standing up for’ a ...”

“... enthusiasm that this engendered, the association that arose then between German self-determination and liberalism and democracy, determined the political and cultural loyalties of the Jews of Austria thereafter – at any rate of the Jews of Western Austria. German-Austrian liberalism was, at the very least, their enemies’ enemy, an ally ...”

“... with shadows and changing reflections threaten the citizen’s most elementary weapon of self-defence: memory.’ Acutely and characteristically, he links passivity to unemployment, and the argument moves off from the dubious ‘politics of spectacle’ into the world Ascherson so insistently dissects, the one in which most people are without ...”

“... he was 21, the excuse for a course he probably would have followed anyway. Having invented a new self, made himself a changeling, he seized on the falsification attending his birth to slam the door of the past behind him for ever. Some years earlier, he had discovered that his mother’s first name was not Lilian, as she had pretended, but Letitia. Perhaps ...”

“... may or may not be activities of any consequence. This is what he has called a poet’s ‘virtuous self-mistrust’. His ‘September Song’, written to memorialise a child who died in the Holocaust, admits that vaunting and suffering may go together: (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) There are difficulties nonetheless with Hill’s enactment of ...”

“... is that he said the same sort of thing about others, while characteristically mingling it with self-disgust: ‘Back in London met Princess Bibesco and did not care for her much, her egoism is as tiresome and her appearance about as unprepossessing as my own.’ Evelyn Waugh being ‘our valued friend’, ‘it amused me to hear Peter laughing at ...”