“... by sniping at his former pupil for relapsing into ‘mysticism’, joking with supreme self-satisfaction that ‘Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said.’Despite Wittgenstein’s indifference, the Tractatus quickly found its way to readers all around the world, accompanied by Russell’s obtuse and unhelpful ...”

“... just about sum Barbara Skelton up. Her emotional frailty is frighteningly visible in her every self-destructive act. She had, Taylor tells us, ‘a germ of temperamental excess’ that led her, at the age of four, ‘to attempt to run her mother through with a carving knife’. Later, an Armenian uncle put his hand down her nightdress and ‘invited her to ...”

“... lists are clearly grounded in the general dynamics of today’s global capitalism. This link is self-evident in the case of ecological problems and the poverty gap between North and South. Is the rise of Islamism not conditioned by the refusal of Muslim civilisation to accept the social dynamics of capitalism? Is the strange turn in China not to do with the ...”

“... in her memoir, Poets in Their Youth.) Delmore Schwartz, Roethke, Jarrell and Berryman were all self-consciously poètes maudits, and they all died before Lowell. So did his pupils Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Dying at 60, Lowell, for all his self-destructive ways, was a survivor. Speaking of life in Boston during one of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sky, and they began marching alongside the highway. They were as ragged, as obscure, as devout and self-involved, as some medieval band on an old woodcut. One might have imagined them marching from village to village, between heathlands or cultivated fields, with one pointed church-steeple signalling the way to the next, above the horizon. But amid those ...”

“... by Pope, aglow with egocentric fervours of ‘urbanity’, but a drier, low-key, scurrilous and self-under-cutting figure (perhaps equally unlike the real Horace) whose ‘laughing satire’ unsettles and undermines instead of issuing defiant self-assertions. This, for the most part, is the Swift who is represented ...”

“... that Hardy was fond of the remembered young man who had written them, and that he had no sense of self-criticism, ever. Hardy’s turn to verse may be the most interesting event in his life during these years, but it is not a major subject in his letters. Here neither literature nor life concerns him much: his principal subjects are business and health. It is ...”

“... book is uncompromising in this regard. Few political writers more than Lippmann stripped the self of its ties to community, family and personal loyalty, in order to enhance the claims of a ‘national’ interest. He perfected the idea that democracy was to be celebrated for (rather than by) the masses by people who knew better, experts who were members ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”