“... of Crisp in the exhibition. You can read in it the dedicated model’s preternatural awareness of self. A sitter with no talent for self-presentation could stymie the photographer. But McBean had something to offer beyond complicity with the sitter’s self-projection. He was a ...”

“... age. Anyhow, the version of anti-intellectualism that’s current is Psychological Darwinism, and Robert Kurzban’s new book is a typical instance. I’ll take a paragraph or two to sketch the connection between what Psychological Darwinists say and the anti-intellectualist thesis that there aren’t any minds. After that, I’ll focus on the latter, as does ...”

“... empirical truth. Aristotle was a pioneer, perhaps, in what I believe to be the commonest form of self-deception in science: the kind of attachment to a dearly loved hypothesis that predisposes us (yes, all of us) to attach a special weight to observations that square with and thus uphold our pet hypotheses, while finding reasons for disregarding or attaching ...”

“... The battle of the ‘little man’ with daily disobligingness is a classic New Yorker trope; the self-generating litany pure Barthelme.This example comes from ‘Down the Line with the Annual’, a story from 1964 about a couple who turn to consumer reports to anchor themselves when everything else seems to be ‘falling apart at an accelerated ...”

“... No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth ...”

“... the demonstrations provoked by the Boer War, he wonders ‘whether England were losing some of her self-control under reverses, and, worst of all, whether in her victories she were becoming blatant.’ The blatancy of jingoism tells the gentleman how he differs, how he is. The gentleman sacrifices himself, the jingo cheers from a safe distance. The gentleman ...”

“... that Coleridge had behaved ‘wickedly’, Coleridge responding with a 5000-word fusillade of self-defence. What remains of a collaboration so briefly so inseparable is a verse tragedy, The Fall of Robespierre, written in two days. Southey benignly summed up: ‘He did me much good – I him more.’ He saved his parting shot for a review of Lyrical ...”

“... the selfless, virtuous, public-spirited unmasking of enemies of the Revolution, as opposed to self-interested sneaking to a tyranny, for which they used the older term, délation. Denunciation, in other words, is a good thing if the motives of the person doing it are selfless and the regime to which it is made is – in the eye of the beholder ...”

“... into a meeting-place which is fiercely lit and surrounded by shadows. When Colin and Mary meet Robert, he drily pumps them: Robert began to ask them questions and at first they answered reluctantly. They told him their names, that they were not married, that they did not live together, at least, not now. Mary gave the ...”

“... for spiritual regeneration as much as a manifesto for environmentally-sensitive policies. For Robert Harrison, too, the Enlightenment took a wrong turning: The new Cartesian distinction between the res cogitans, or thinking self, and the res extensa, or embodied substance, sets up the terms for the objectivity of ...”

“... were led by their discontent with the hegemony of experimentation to study the controversy between Robert Boyle, patron saint or founding shaman of the experimental method, and his most profound and systematic opponent Thomas Hobbes: a controversy which began in 1661 with the publication of Hobbes’s Dialogus physicus de natura aeris and which continued in a ...”

“... artists, who also followed her in turning away from modernist precedents to make what the artist Robert Morris called ‘antiformal’ sculpture, in which edges were softened, boundaries blurred and internal structure collapsed.In 1964, Bourgeois showed her new latex work at the Stable Gallery in New York. The pieces were very different from the upright ...”

“... poppers, hooks, studs, laces, toggles, drawstrings, safety-pins and even old-time fibulae? But, as Robert Friedel shows, the passion for novelty has become the real mother of invention; necessity rarely enters into it. Today the greatness of a nation is measured by the aggregated lengths of zipper to be found in its people’s wardrobes. The zipper has ceased ...”

“... We have lost such confidence. Imperial decline and economic mismanagement have replaced historical self-congratulation with historical self-criticism. Middle-class virtues have become as unmentionable as aristocratic ones. And so the reputation of 1688 is once more in decline. Macaulay, hailing the uniqueness of England’s ...”

“... interweaves deep historical insights with a strong composer’s inevitable prejudices – Robert Simpson’s impersonal challenge is spotlessly objective, sternly factual and, at the same time, unashamedly ethical. His scrupulous analysis of the Proms’ past yields a practical proposal as well as what already seems to have proved an indisputable ...”