“... honest to yourself about yourself is good for you – which is I suppose what all narratives about self-realisation must be about. By contrast The Magician, which is not about coming out but about staying firmly in, occupies a much more complicated and neurotic world, in which Mann’s negation of his homosexual feelings is admittedly a kind of moral failure ...”

“... Mutiny and has accelerated since Independence, that the country has been restored to an ancient self, while gaining a new freedom and self-consciousness – qualities which, India being India, have been attended, but not so far endangered, by rage, disorder, ‘a million mutinies’. The book does not argue for, or ...”

“... Right.’ To place the judiciary in this way on opposite sides of the same argument seems self-contradictory. Nevertheless it is true that the law, like most other things, has a variety of dynamics and imperatives, some of them at odds with others. Among these are the law’s promise, not of an infallible trial but of a fair one, and the rule that ...”

“... a ‘political project’, the challenging of the inferiority complex that blights the Scots’ self-image. And the many collaborators on A Claim of Right for Scotland debate the case for last year’s document of that name: it is reproduced in full and seems to me much the most reasonable and impressive manifesto for Scottish nationhood in my lifetime. I ...”

“... were often subtle, and didactic in no baneful sense. Civilised conduct, which encompassed wit, self-humour and sociability, necessarily excluded bombast. And the presence of women in an active – at times a presiding – role contributed a new measure of incisiveness, sensibility and grace.’ One sees what it is: Steegmuller is beginning to paint an ...”

“... this vexatious flatulence, and therefore have troublesome nights.’ Johnson had his fair share of self-pity, though more on matters mental than physical. Self-pity has had a bad press lately, but someone who has no sorrow for themselves will hardly have pity on others. Johnson’s capacity to feel for himself can readily be ...”

“... would bully us into accepting that in morality and aesthetics ‘stoic’ and ‘Horatian’ are self-evidently words of ill omen. A helluva lot of people through the centuries have thought them very honourable words indeed, as Peter Makin certainly knows. There is a brazenness about the manoeuvre which in an odd way I find engaging, as it is in the young ...”

“... in conduct. Swinburne repudiated Victorianism in the 1860s, and the Victorians were good at self-criticism: as G.M. Young pointed out, ‘the truth is that much of what we call Victorianism is a picture at second-hand, a satirical picture drawn by the Victorians themselves.’ This internal dialogue is the central preoccupation of Gallagher, who rightly ...”

“... at any earlier time in its history’. If Morgan provides ample ingredients for Labour’s self-examination, how far does he guide the Party towards reassessment? His political tastes limit what he can offer. He writes about people drawn from ‘the British political tradition in which I generally feel most comfortable’, and in several asides he ...”

“... the same for Republika Srbija. This is more than just an anecdote. Ivory Coast is at once a very self-enclosed place and the most pan-African country on a continent where the political dream of integration remains elusive. Houphouët-Boigny wasn’t a dreamer in the mould of Kwame Nkrumah or Sékou Touré, two of his radical pan-African neighbours. A ...”

“... delighting in bards and ballads, was happy, repeatedly, to style himself a ‘bard’, as well as, self-deprecatingly, ‘a bardie’ and, with mock immodesty, ‘my bardship’. By this time bards were everywhere – in England too. Thomas Gray, a Cambridge don, wrote ‘The Bard’; William Collins, in London, hankered after the ‘Old Runic bards’ of the ...”

“... by periods of falling out and kissing and making up with England, episodes in which national self-interest was always prominent, whether in James’s opportunistic support for Perkin Warbeck against Henry VII in the 1490s or his acquisition of Margaret as Queen in the 1500s. In the run-up to Flodden, James lodged his claim to the English throne should ...”

“... the examination itself and they persisted long after examinations were over, my social and class self-consciousness not entirely shed until long after my education proper was finished. December 1951 was sunny but bitterly cold and though there was no snow the Cam was frozen and the lawns and quadrangles white with frost; coming to it from the soot and grime ...”

“... of distinct ideological and quasi-religious purpose, more aware of his limitations and his lack of self-confidence than of the recognition the world awarded. He now appears as a liberal bigot whom no socialist, Christian or conservative could consider non-partisan. Mrs Moorman’s book concentrates on the period before his return to Cambridge as Regius ...”

“... from a male point of view. The feminine in his work is always the Other, in distinction to the Self, and understood from the outside rather than from within. But it is precisely from a dialectic between Self and Other that his plays are constructed. We should not, Bamber claims, be interrogating them for an answer to the ...”