“... the voice in which his poems spoke, already had a tinge of bardic anonymity, a suggestion that the self had indeed been humbled, but momentously: Seamus Heaney the man was being elected, so it seemed to him, into the role of Seamus Heaney, poet. If this makes him sound like George Barker, it absolutely shouldn’t. What is attractive about Heaney’s response ...”

“... politics; nobility and grandeur don’t, as with Elgar, wake doubts about a possible touch of self-pity. Verdi is at once exciting and safe. One reason why he seems safe may be that, after all, we don’t know him as well as we think. His life coincided with the high point of archive creation – after the establishment of reliable postal services and ...”

“... hardly ever recognised. Shafarevich’s nationalism is both an attempt to raise dwindling Russian self-esteem (as the patently faltering economy further belies the regime’s claims to socialism and to relative economic advancement) and a specific, intellectual response to the ‘cult’ of Jewish emigration, the ‘apotheosis of flight’, the tendency, as ...”

“... gospel for himself from the Bible’ would lead to infidelity – ‘You will unravel the web of self-sufficient inquiry’ – proved true not only for Francis but also for Fitzjames Stephen. Born into an Evangelical family with the habit of inquiry, and imagining himself, as he later said, ‘a highly intellectual little saint’, he passed gradually into ...”

“... At the same time he was obsessed with the possibility. Probably the best account of his youthful self is in the first volume of Anthony Powell’s memoirs, Infants of the Spring. ‘He was one of those individuals – a recognised genus – who seem to have been sent into the world to be talked about. Such persons satisfy a basic human need. Connolly’s ...”

“... element of wish-fulfilment can have some disturbing effects, as Paul Williams revealed in a candid self-analysis: ‘There’s a terrible thing that happens ... I find that the better the performance – you know when Dylan, when I was like, sitting in the audience in Berkeley in’86 – Dylan’s doing “Lenny Bruce” and I’m thinking “God! this is ...”

“... justifying the popular fascination with ‘heritage’, even in its more meretricious forms. Most self-consciously ‘progressive’ writers have tended to denounce the heritage business as an unacceptable opiate: not only does it enable aristocrats to go on living in their country houses; it also presents a sanitised and sentimental version of the past in ...”

“... expunged from the later version. It was something of a paradox that in the middle of the war this self-important innocent should have been chosen by Hitler to run the arms economy for him. Success in this endeavour made it more and more unlikely that the new Berlin would materialise. Indeed if Speer’s efforts had kept the war going six months longer Berlin ...”

“... rightly, both he and Straw are hesitant to proclaim their Christian faith for fear of appearing self-righteous or exclusive and fanatical.’ Is this a tacit admission that, in a secular society, too overt a religious commitment generates suspicion rather than approval? Does it follow therefore that Christians should disguise their Christianity, talk about ...”

“... all subjects of particular importance to a country which is undergoing a painful process of self-examination, as can be seen in the series of referenda held during the Eighties and Nineties on issues such as divorce and abortion, which have forced us to look at the nature of the Irish family and the central and destructive role played by the Catholic ...”

“... when its implications are carried out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.’ There is certainly a disappearance of the ego which undercuts the possibility of solipsistic thinking: it shows up later in the challenge to the very ...”

“... Blake and Shelley both drew a firm line at other practices: Blake at masturbation (‘The self enjoyings of self denial’), and Shelley at homosexuality (he was incredulous that the ‘operose’ act of sodomy should have been performed by the Greeks). Shelley is famous for having written that ‘chastity is a ...”

“... something was the prospect of a ‘German century’, ended by what Stern calls a ‘stoppable self-destruction’. The ambiguous promise of Einstein’s German world is evoked in a series of biographical studies, supplemented by several more general essays. The most substantial piece, taking up a third of the book, describes the relationship of Haber and ...”

“... seen similar insects in cabinets, at home, but it is quite another thing to capture such one’s self – to feel it struggling between one’s fingers, and to gaze upon its fresh and living beauty, a bright gem shining out amid the silent gloom of a dark and tangled forest. The village of Dobbo held that evening at least one contented man. Wallace returned ...”

“... something that ran in the family) and showed poor concentration at his lessons. To counter these self-centred and lazy habits, he was entrusted at the age of seven to Dr Georg Hinzpeter. The tutor’s pedagogical views tended to be (in his own words) ‘hard or even bleak’, and he certainly had little time for ...”