“... city states expected of their citizens. If the Athenians were wrong, they acted in legitimate self-defence. Nietzsche went further. He shared Hegel’s belief that the soul-centred individualism preached by Christ had in essentials come into the world with Socrates; unlike Hegel, he regretted the discovery – or invention – of the Christian ...”

“... I think that I only think that I can think,’ and worries about struggles in his most private self that no one else will understand. This may seem at odds with the man who writes of his hunger for any sort of publicity, but throughout MacDiarmid’s career private anxieties and public pugnacity appear to have fuelled one another. The talented but ...”

“... and they did suggest the liberating drama of a poet feeling her way towards an original style of self-expression. In this new collection, however, McGuckian’s sensibility seems to have become trapped within the idiom. Many of the poems feel syntactically inert, but are forced to stagger forward under an impossible weight of proliferating metaphors. At her ...”

“... Kent – with the bishops sleeping on cork mattresses in student bedrooms and enduring cafeteria self-service at every meal except dinner. It all represents a far cry from the days when even missionary bishops – who, a previous Archbishop of Canterbury once warned, tended to be ‘men of eccentric mode of proceeding’ – would find themselves at ...”

“... dimly), with a few other indistinct figures swimming through the suffocating depths of his self-regard. Wolfe could see clearly enough the myriad disconnected objects that helped to furnish his boundless ego. But like Funes the Memorious, he could neither forget anything he saw nor imagine anything he had not seen. The one subject Wolfe does offer a ...”

“... sounds the nicest, and certainly the most soulful, though not without faults: she was terribly self-absorbed and self-pitying. James Fox is her grandson, but he gives her only just over two columns of entries in his index, while Nancy has four and a half, with a long section on ‘character’. It has subheadings for ...”

“... with all those Biblical references. The narrator of The Sorrows of Satan, Geoffrey Tempest, is a self-pitying failed novelist who receives by the same post the news that he has been left five million pounds and a friendly self-introduction from a mysterious Prince Lucio Rimânez. When the superbly poised Prince ...”

“... of luck in my career,’ says Mr Turner, ‘so I don’t want to moan too much about having to self-publish. If I’d had a longer life expectation I might have hung on a bit longer and kept trying for a commercial publisher. You might wonder why I didn’t get myself an agent, but agents don’t want to take on octogenarians.’ After 18 excellent books ...”

“... heart of his political thought is a notion that is familiar to us from Fanon: ‘the return to the self’. The Third World, as it was then called, had been colonised not just by the armies but by the commercial products and ideologies of the West. For all its fathomless history and monuments of thought and literature, Iran was, in the famous term coined by ...”

“... should constitute a State is contrary to the nature of modern civilisation’. The ethnically self-standing was the politically and morally self-stultifying. It obstructed human evolution, not least because it prevented the more civilised from elevating the less. Social progress depended on ‘the mixture of races under ...”

“... forms of human life. The years from the 1780s to the 1850s saw, not only the first great phase of self-sustained economic growth, but also the first great phase of self-sustained discussion about poverty. Throughout this period, the poor, the tired and the huddled masses forced themselves on public attention in greater ...”

“... pose the question: how did Gaitskell himself see his diary? An intellectual discipline, a self-imposed requirement to reflect on and learn from his own experience? A means of emotional and intellectual release? A record for history? A defence against misrepresentation? A source for a much later volume of memoirs or autobiography, never to be ...”

“... to look at it with a mixture of fascination and discomfort. The near-bankruptcy of the largest self-governing city in the industrialised world was certainly a circus worth watching, and, as many other American cities soon discovered, it could not be watched disinterestedly. The aversion of investors for bonds and notes issued by New York City soon spread ...”

“... George Eliot, she finds, is disqualified by her morality. Doris Lessing is a pioneer of feminist self-consciousness in its raw state, and the very rhythm of her remorseless, circular and outstandingly honest narrative reflects the essentially inward-looking perceptions of a woman, as opposed to the linear undertakings of a man. Therefore, instead of writing ...”

“... men are to earth o’ergiven/these the companions’), but also that he needed to underline the self-abnegation. Sincerity, like patriotism (which Davie has too), is not enough. Moving as these recollections often are, in their evocation of places (the West Riding, the Arctic Circle, Cambridge or California) and of people (Douglas Brown, Yvor Winters, an ...”