“... 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 ...”

“... vernacular revivalist and the younger a skilled landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen builders. Eventually, he all but scratched his family from the record – especially his curious father, a military horse painter turned landscapist whose later years ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... too large a share in it. Ethical standards, he maintains, were designed not merely to supply the self-esteem of professional respectability, which might seem explanation enough, but to assure purchasers that the books they bought were what they purported to be. The ethics were not simply business ones, for there was a ‘bond between domestic and ...”

“... masses to act led to the grandiose brutality of the Red Army Faction; in America, to the self-imposed marginalisation of the Weather Underground and the crazed fantasy of the SLA. In Britain, the success of public sector workers in bringing the country to a halt persuaded elements of the late 1960s new left that the old left had been right all ...”

“... Looking at a girl activist’s ferociously bitten nails, he riffs again: ‘It was always these self-devouring types who ended up here, hating Nike . . . It used to be you had to make munitions to piss people off. Now it was enough to be large, global and successful. That made it a more radical, systematic critique . . . And more ...”

“... internally coherent overall structure of such dispositions – a single, integrated personality or self – across the course of a lifetime. So someone who performs actions that are in accordance with nature in some contexts but not others, or who feels indifferent about some indifferents but not all, or who is in any way prone to find that some aspects of his ...”

“... nearly human. Loving a man is not sainthood, but Smart showed how far a person could go towards self-immolation – all that distance, all those years – simply to avoid devaluing their own capacity for love. Trying to cope and trying to write are not usually twins in the mind of the male writer. But for Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf they are the ...”

“... was at the fledgling stage, so was the Indian art world, with its ambivalences and lack of self-belief. Paradoxically, it was those who might be accused of not understanding art who would nourish it, unknowingly, through this delicate moment, setting up a concomitance between its life and theirs. It was as if their lives were destined, in some ...”

“... jingoism, lies at its heart. The Oslo Accords, which launched the Palestinians on the road to self-government, bypassed the matter of Jerusalem along with the other truly difficult issues in the dispute: the right of return of the 1948 refugees, the future of the Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories and the borders of the Palestinian ...”

“... to use the qualities which distinguish us from the rest of nature – apocalyptic prediction, self-restraint, the ability to alter our environment with an eye to the consequences – in order to ‘save nature’ from ourselves, a mere part of nature. Peter Wessel Zappfe, another Norwegian ecosopher, has suggested that our perception of the destructive ...”

“... judgment; the Wealth of Nations, on the other hand, portrays us as beings motivated largely by self-interest. To generations of scholars this sharp contrast between the sympathetic and the selfish conjured up a hermeneutic abyss. Various strategies were employed to bridge it. Had Smith’s readers confounded prescription with description, a humanistic ...”

“... The heroine must be driven in some way towards the sad end made importantly tragic by a seed of self-destruction planted when she was very young. And indeed, Sonia Orwell was well equipped with potential demons in her youth. Her childhood was a colonial mess. Born in Calcutta, she had a father who died, perhaps by suicide, when she was a few months old, and ...”