“... 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 ...”

“... where Charles Edward Stuart had slept, dressing Johnson up in bonnet and broadsword, was not just self-indulgence on Boswell’s part, but a way of proving to himself and to his absent but always censorious father that he, Boswell, remained a true Scot, that London had not seduced him quite from his original identity. Away from the capital and sophisticated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is burdened by history, and for whom the central theme of modern life is our own historical self-consciousness. The 20th century, for these writers, is the historical century par excellence. The 19th, by contrast, was less exhaustively documented and now seems to have been nourished on chauvinistic legends rather than the brutality of facts. For ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the sense that these locutions have been carefully chosen and placed by the speaker’s adult self. This produces an acoustic and visual doubling, so words and scenes are presented simultaneously from the past looking forward, and from the present looking back – an effect introduced in the starting poem, ‘On Our Marks’, which concludes: At the end ...”

“... English, presumably intended as a sign of her own education, rarely penetrates a self-imposed haze of Christmas card smugness: ‘For ignorance is criminal / In this enlightened day, / So let us all get busy / When once we’ve found the way.’ Apart from one or two stirring numbers, the music flounders and sprawls, clutching at a gravity ...”

“... Some of our received opinions about the Victorians’ mortuary excesses owe as much to their own self-criticism as to their actual practice: contemporary reformers were quick to denounce the expensive funerals popular at the beginning of the period, for example, just as they later campaigned against the ‘ghoul-like ghastliness’ of extravagant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the chief apostle are not celebrated. We know Huxley as a photograph or a cartoon: heavy-jawed and self-confident, or already fixed in marble. Or better, like one of those nodding-doll holograms that ceaselessly repeats a greeting. ‘Hallo. I’m Thomas Henry. I’d rather be an ape than a bishop. Hallo, I’m Thomas Henry. I’d rather be an ape than a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”