“... only has he made a canny foray into organic groceries: he has developed what might be called his self-esteem. Another marital bust-up hasn’t done for him: he has lived in the States, the land of eternal optimists, serial marriers and career opportunists. ‘Transparency, efficiency, virtue, convenience and flexibility’ are his keywords, and though he ...”

“... of visionary beauty, of a yearning or pressurised lyricism which will, despite their estranged and self-estranging contexts, constitute the first-time reader’s most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this ...”

“... of their Society, and only when that Society had been radically transformed, and the original self-determination of the human species restored to all its members, would such symptoms of social disease be eradicated. Emile Durkheim took account of neither Peuchet nor Marx in his celebrated Suicide of 1897, a chilly work which claimed to document ‘social ...”

“... great, leonine head of curls tilted above Dostoevsky’s Idiot’. Mary is shocked at Meredith’s self-assurance, since after all she is ‘somewhat chubby and very oddly dressed’, but quickly warms to her sophisticated literary knowledge and all-round brilliance. They form a friendship ‘based almost entirely on indolence, a monastic passion for doing ...”

“... a lot of people at the time. Unless you were willing to plough through huge volumes on workers’ self-management, the rise and fall of the non-aligned movement or tendentious biographies of Tito, there wasn’t much to read about Yugoslavia. Class, not ethnicity, was what most academics had been interested in during the Cold War, but now nationalism was the ...”

“... salutes to society belles – Isabelle Lemonnier and the like – and, bizarrely, in a rare self-portrait, brought in from Tokyo, his often debonair capriciousness gets reduced to a shrugging jemenfoutisme. These precious, vapid fumblings may well have conformed to his personal creed of ‘sincerity’, but they dissipate the exhibition’s energy ...”

“... Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing, by looking at his works in a broader context. She examined his self-presentation as a physician in his treatises and described the highly combative version of medicine practised in various public arenas: in the streets of Rome, in informal theatres set up for anatomical displays, and at the bedside of patients, crowded with ...”

“... completely untrustworthy.’ I had to agree, but her refusal to contemplate the Kashmiri self-determination promised by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was troubling. These days the very suggestion seems utopian. The Abdullah dynasty continues to hold power in Kashmir and is keen to collaborate with New Delhi and enrich itself. I rang a journalist in ...”

“... to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge. The same is true of natural resources, the exploitation of which is one of the ...”

“... What defeated it was not the fact that left-wing commentators were against it, as its leaders self-pityingly claimed, but its own complete inability to articulate policies different from those the political establishment was pushing anyway, though without the noisy nationalism. New Right intellectuals were mostly historians but they failed to understand ...”

“... expect it to go away soon. They are often right: most community-acquired intestinal infections are self-limiting and get better more quickly if left untreated. This is true even for E. coli O157. Taking antibiotics or antispasmodics is thought to increase the risk of developing the complications of kidney failure, brain damage and cardiac death. But ...”

“... the stout middle-aged Millais can’t be dismissed as a bloated parody of his earlier skinnier self. Probably no career, on extended examination, could turn on quite such simple axes. In fact they show that the later manner represents an expansion of the artist’s reach. The Pre-Raphaelite Mariana is the sum of its parts, an interior sustained by ...”

“... didn’t have to look too far for his character’s name: Forrester works with trees. There is a self-conscious aside: ‘In the European club at Simla they never tire of the joke, Forrester the forester.’ The man ‘takes a gulp from a flask of brackish water and strains in the saddle as his horse slips and rights itself, sending stones bouncing down a ...”

“... at first offered Grieve merely a convenient alter ego through whom he might enjoy the pleasures of self-contradiction. Grieve had, earlier that year, written savagely about the ‘infantilism’ of Scottish vernacular poetry, pouring particular scorn on writers so distanced from their own cultural roots that they had to glean their vocabularies from ...”

“... have to choose between describing clockwork dummies and describing himself. In any case, Leach’s self-representations were shot through with the most disconcerting contradictions. As an anthropologist, he was famously divided against himself. ‘I feel that sometimes I am both sides of the fence,’ he once confessed. During his most creative years, which ...”