“... would be fair. Perhaps none of that is our business. There are no end of families badly treated by self-obsessed individuals who have made great and lasting contributions to the wider world. The personal failures ought not to detract from an assessment of the work. But there is a question to be asked of a purveyor of wisdom who displays none in his dealings ...”

“... and madness.’ Flushed with hope, Chatterton launched himself with funds of inexperience and self-illusion. So he writes to his mother at the beginning of May: Good God! how superior is London to that despicable place Bristol! Here is none of your little meannesses, none of your mercenary securities ... The poverty of authors is a common ...”

“... that the obstacle to implementing his social politics was the Liberal peerage: in fact, it was the self-satisfied middle classes, who had long had more power over the content of Liberalism than Chamberlain recognised, and who quickly became alarmed by his rhetoric and activity. At the Board of Trade, he antagonised laissez-faire shipowners and railway ...”

“... social confidence ... It was hard to believe she would run away at such a critical time, and that self-esteem was more important than the future of the NYO.’ Not another word about Ivey Dickson, no hint that she was to change her mind and remain Musical Director for the next 18 years. The NYO I joined in 1968 was nominally Ivey Dickson’s, but judging by ...”

“... the pleasures of the senses.’) He is also used throughout the book as a sounding-board for the self-conscious and idealistic aspirations which characterise the ivory towers of education as much as the classically isolated loci of detection. Subsequent novels experimented with quotations, both embedded and epigraphic, from Pope, Keats, Marcus Aurelius and ...”

“... Mead’ is coming to represent: the blunderer into tribal life, dupe of the primitives, the self-dramatiser, spinner of graceless and unlikely theories. Another version of the anthropologist is the philosopher of culture and society in all its variations, one who understands humanity in some broad, if rather intuitive and dreamy way: Ruth ...”

“... countrymen, who seemed to have a talent for revolution but no corresponding talent for self-government; more broadly, its target was every anxious liberal who sympathised with the political and economic aspirations of the less favoured members of society, but feared their predilection for dictators, every liberal whose instincts were ...”

“... of disciples in the Lower Fourth, the really superior person, not saint, not sage, but outcast, self-abandoned. Waugh had the same school-world dreams in social form, and they continue to exercise a fascination – crude, perhaps, but potent. His popularity shows, among other things, how those with the instinct to opt out have a keen relish for opting in at ...”

“... Capet’. It was a literary event in another sense, too. Controversialists on every side tried self-consciously to attain a rhetorical pitch appropriate to their commitment. Burke, Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, as much as Brissot, Danton and Robespierre, tried to seize the stylistic initiative as much as the political initiative, or more accurately as ...”

“... it be done handsomely, they would turn them all from Females into Males; so great is grown the self-conceit of the Masculine, and the disregard of the Female Sex.’ Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Newton all rejected allegory and the personification of the mind or the soul. In science the ‘feminine’ was excised from the imagined process of ...”

“... class oppression for overt war, while announcing the imminent arrival of the freedom, justice and self-fulfilment preached by the idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one ...”

“... know (and note how carefully all five of the senses are brought into it). But it is also an act of self-definition, MacNeice claiming a role for himself, the Poet as Ordinary Bloke. The particulars in the Zoo passage sound ordinary enough, but the telling of them is highly poetical, from the allusion to Hopkins’s sonnet at the beginning to the swirl of ...”

“... the left apparently come round to these Liberal causes? The cynic would, no doubt, allege blatant self-interest. Losing any hope that Labour can possibly win the next election on our existing electoral system, the Left have now come to see that PR is their only way of returning a Labour government to power. This cynical view would also explain the glaring ...”

“... also a risky, flamboyant, long-sustained star performance, complete with pratfalls and buffoonery, self-mockery and self-castigation. Anything she dishes out she is more than ready to take; and as a performer, she has never shirked making an idiot of herself, or washing bloody knickers in public. The querulous critic can be ...”

“... southern Argentina. And he is certainly not the embodiment of Indian aspirations for justice and self-realisation: ‘After several hours we were forced into conversation with the only other white people on board, the only people we could talk to since the wary Indians offered no more than monosyllabic replies to questions from outsiders. In fact, these kids ...”