“... in the know. We didn’t expect ‘thistle seed’ to be thistle seed but we did expect to feel self-satisfied, maybe even smug. It wasn’t meant to be at all like this when we stared into the ...”

“... see me as theproject I am for this planet, earth, the one who needs work, accursed, material, my self, myone singular war memorial, my own native land, temporary, what shall I search for in thecity of searches, part of the circuitry in here with you, animated, these are not actualwords, they come out as integers you track, where are the crumbs, where are the ...”

“... lowered –I suppose with everything else going onit can pretend it’s not happening. Deception,self-deception, advance by degrees,my dead friend reminds me, and who hasn’tbrought themselves to harm becausethey thought they had to? The dead can be kinderthan the living, if you are not related to them.The anger I would give Orionis what has been given ...”

“... This strenuous giving and receiving of sadomasochistic sex was surely only another form of self-punishment. It was the gay aping the worst excesses of the chauvinistic sexist male, treating his sexual partner with insensitivity and cruelty. What is more, the receiver fully colluded with the act. Both the gays in the partnership were as fully locked ...”

“... to the house looking for something. All I wanted to see, though, were some sketches towards a self-portrait that John Butler Yeats had made in New York towards the end of his life. After lunch, Michael Yeats motioned me to follow him into the hallway. He opened a long drawer in an old chest and began to rummage until he found, wrapped in tissue ...”

“... of the audience, how high a place does he fall from? A further ambiguity comes in with the hint of self-mockery that was inevitable with Welles in the lead. Every detail of the portrait suggested a curious intuition: this hero who loves himself and betrays others never entirely fools himself. He exists to draw people in, to make them enjoy no world but ...”

“... sense of something that Cicero in De Divinatione considered the big issue: god/s. An author as self-conscious as Wood is, of course, by no means innocent of the possibility of his own oracularity qua author, which serves nicely to ironise the quantity of erudite, esoteric allusion, alternately formal and familiar, which will for many readers be the most ...”

“... Charmian (an ‘infantile’ mate-woman, as Stone portrayed her), and ultimately to suicide from a self-administered overdose of morphine. Stone based his suicide thesis on interviews and on some alleged notes by the dying man’s bed. ‘Uremia’, Stone alleged, was a cover-up by Charmian and her pliant doctors. Stone’s Sailor on Horseback remains both ...”

“... Australia, created by a Labor government ‘to help the sons and daughters of the working man’), self-education (he called his intellectual autobiography A blacksmith looks at a university) and afforestation. Three of his children passed through the University but the fourth struggled at school and was exiled (‘Dad didn’t believe in failure’) up to a ...”

“... came to nothing in their idleness. Henry Senior’s passionate filial revolt against the ruthless self-interest embodied by William of Albany continued in the mystical-theological sphere, where he had an eccentric angle pretty much to himself – which at least gave him a lifetime’s driven work. It greatly helps The Jameses to hang together, as it helped ...”

“... lights and the more ambitious cadres were heavily besuited, as betokens the new ruling class they self-consciously aspire to be. Nelson Mandela was shocked to see T-shirted drivers chauffeuring VIPs like himself and immediately prescribed collars and ties. Adelaide Tambo and Winnie Mandela vied with one another in the extravagance of the traditional African ...”

“... in school. The Bolshevik platform before the Russian Revolution had stressed national rights and self-determination, and many non-Russian radicals such as Stalin were attracted to Lenin’s group for this reason. The early Bolshevik leaderships included large numbers of Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Balts, Jews and others. Immediately after taking ...”

“... whose work has done more perhaps than any of the others’ to shake the coherence and conscious self-certainty of the modern liberal self. The omission of Marx and Lenin is a different matter. Holmes is quite explicit about the need to establish a distinct category of ‘non-Marxist anti-liberalism’ and I think he is ...”

“... told in group settings which diffuse the sense of dange’ and guilt (a bit like contemporary self-help support groups). Bruno Bettelheim noted (in The Uses of Enchantment) the comfort that even a solitary telling can bring to a child who realises that other people have told and heard the tale and, presumably, have also experienced the threatening ...”

“... the world. Yet the growth of the historian’s mind, so to speak, never reduces itself to tiresome self-contemplation. On the contrary, Hobsbawm’s solutions to the problems of his own epistemology become part of his quest for knowledge. This emergent global consciousness is at its most memorable in the opening of The Age of Empire, where he records the ...”