“... 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 ...”

“... the Ogonis and neighbouring minorities for a share of oil revenues, some measure of environmental self-determination, and economic redress for their oil-drenched environment. By the time Saro-Wiwa was executed, the Nigerian military and the Mobile Police Force had killed two thousand Ogonis – either they straightforwardly murdered them or they burnt their ...”

“... now you’re just like the rest of us” ... But I compare myself with my former self, not with others. I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent.’ To be in the early stages of mania is intoxicating: to be ‘just like the rest of us’ is to be reduced and ...”

“... addicts we pursue that entertainment to our detriment.On the one hand, Wallace’s thesis seems self-evident now that the United States’s economy has striated into white-collar and service-oriented jobs, and its major growth sector is the merged ‘industries’ of entertainment and communications technology; on the other hand, it’s more than a little ...”

“... indifferent to this misery, and that our daily thinking about our duty to others is marked by self-serving irrationality. We typically believe that we do have a moral duty to rescue others who are at risk, especially where this can be done without great cost to ourselves. For example, most people would agree that a bystander has a duty to rescue a child ...”

“... for enlarged state provision in all Western countries are now increasingly framed in terms, not of self-realisation and higher ends, but of consumer satisfactions and individualised private rights. A rather different range of binary contrasts, but one that similarly links timeless questions of theory to more concrete issues in social and constitutional ...”

“... their destruction. He, too, documents a sad tale of personal betrayal, compromised principle and self-deception, emplotting his own story as Clinton’s campaign aide, director of communications and senior adviser as an uneven, but ultimately friendship-shattering process of disillusionment with the man whose career he once so ardently forwarded. Where ...”

“... to Germany in two world wars, Joan of Arc and General de Gaulle are central to the French national self-image and F.D. Roosevelt is central to the story of America’s interwar economic recovery, and Nelson Mandela is central to South Africa’s new-found racial harmony. Exalted company for our two great heroes – but surely justified? Not according to the ...”

“... from the outset offering instruction on the difference between the essential and the existential self. This kind of thing must have been hard going for the audience, which had presumably come to hear about Shakespeare and wasn’t expecting Kierkegaard and the like; and it still doesn’t always seem very transparent on the page. The excuse for its first ...”

“... of the subterfuge for himself. The sense of dread he conveys is authentic – it is a loss of self, of connection to the world. Romand’s actions seem an extrusion of this vacuity, a radical kind of thoughtlessness. Yet Carrère largely eschews forensic speculation: had he presented Romand as a psychopath with obscurely Oedipal fears and a megalomaniac ...”

“... a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were his brothers much better. Probably, as David Cannadine has written, the lives, loves and morals of George III’s children made them ‘the most unloved royal generation in English history’; though the previous ...”

“... like Philip Hensher (who twice rehashed Leavis’s line that the ‘set’ were not artists but self-publicists) and Waldemar Januszczak (‘Bloomsbury. Just tapping out these ten tedious letters has brought on a severe attack of RSI’). Yet in truth – to throw off my coat entirely – I find myself readily empathising with that last remark, more ...”

“... and how do we make descriptive and prescriptive distinctions between the inalienable components of self and the commodifiable bits of not-self? What are the rights and values pertaining to this ‘we’ whose configuration advances in biomedical science require us to decide on and even to enshrine in law? Who can alienate ...”

“... literary allusions, and yet barely a cadence or a phrase sounds derived. He seems as a poet not self-invented, which would be too knowing, but self-conceived. Like the idea of ‘new weather’, the title of his first extraordinary book, his poetry seems impossibly original. The End of the Poem attempts to show us how ...”

“... Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal ...”