“... of his youth (his father was a distinguished West Country physician) into a world of sexual self-awareness and reasonable contentment. The flight from England, via the gondoliers of Venice and a house on the zattere, to invalidism at Davos Platz became, in that biography, the model of a whole type of Victorian upper-class career. The relationship ...”

“... a poem which raises the whole issue of ‘maturity’. That ponderous term, stale with Leavisian self-importance, may seem inappropriate when applied to a poem which takes its dramatis personae from popular commodity culture and which is dazzlingly funny in its idiom and execution, its line running on so energetically that it transforms its feminine rhymes ...”

“... writers on manuscript material and the ‘scientific’ study of early printed texts. As self-made scholars, their careers are heroic. Wise left school early and had his higher education from the Camden Road Mutual Improvement Society. Neither went to university. Each achieved more single-handedly, in the way of scholarship, than whole departments of ...”

“... onto a screen of what is actual and present by means of the poet’s tactic ... That godlike self, never known before, comes into focus and vanishes again in one quick shift of view. As the planes of vision jump, the actual self and the ideal self and the difference between them ...”

“... as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it. I do not want to exaggerate, in a self-pitying or self-dramatising way, the present extent or intensity of this dislike; I am not thinking of the philosopher as emblematically represented by the figure of Socrates, the martyr to free thought who reaches what ...”

“... we want to know. It may tell us why German soldiers fought on tenaciously even when the war was self-evidently lost, or why economic life continued to function even under severe aerial bombardment. It may explain individual atrocities, such as the shooting of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves in 1944. The commander of this massacre, SS Captain Erich ...”

“... in certain cases, but the distinction between intellectus and res does not typically require self-instantiation in this way, or the only true sentences would be those which do self-instantiate – like ‘This sentence is in English.’ Shell tells us that Heidegger ‘seems to suggest’ that truth is ‘in this sense ...”

“... education and its reform tended to lay stress on the importance of the study of history. At the self-same period in which some present-day women’s historians have detected a widening gulf between the private sphere of middle and upper-class women, and the public role of their menfolk, women from precisely these social backgrounds were being urged to read ...”

“... of the Revolutionary legacy. What matters is political philosophy, each society’s attempt at self-reflection and self-understanding. The longest single quotation in the book comes from a speech by Royer-Collard in 1822, in which he explained that ‘the death of the old society’ opened the way to centralisation ...”

“... notebook on transmutation and begun to develop a theory of evolution which, by finding in nature a self-acting and self-generating power to explain the emergence of species without need of special or continuous creation, effectively turned God into what the authors neatly call the ‘absentee landlord’ of the ...”

“... it off.’ (Why hadn’t he already seen My Fair Lady?) Audrey in bed, watching herself: such star self-inspection fascinates me. Once, in real life, I asked Vanessa Redgrave what she felt like when she watched herself on screen. She said that she tried to be objective about herself, and that an actor grows accustomed to ...”

“... Stasi’s domestic role as he claims? The old prestidigitator is disarmingly free with generalised self-criticism. ‘Throughout my career I overlooked, minimised or rationalised repressive episodes,’ he says. What the book lacks is specifics. In a rather different sense from his father, Markus Wolf also led a charmed life, because he was always looking the ...”

“... happen. He begins with government: London must have one, like everywhere else, as a token of self-respect. In the current fashion, he sees this government not as an organ of true popular representation but as a slim-line, Giuliani-style, executive mayoralty, charged with tackling the city’s backlog of strategic planning problems and ‘giving it a ...”

“... novel rather than Charlie’s violent schlock. Charlie rescues Bobby and himself from this self-destructive effort at redemption, itself ironised by the worthlessness of the novel in question, but the play suffers from the implausibility of Bobby’s temporary loss of his self-protective cynical edge. Where the woman ...”

“... examination, prove ever so slightly asymmetrical and as such bear some relation to life. As a self-confessed ‘public transport enthusiast’, he would also doubtless pause to consider the modern equivalent of the gig-lamp (if indeed it is equivalent), the headlamp, as seen on buses, trams, cars, lorries etc, and to measure its kind of symmetry, which ...”