“... opening sequence of Un Chien andalou. The mutilation of symbol, value, history and even of self was crucial to the Modernist urge. The moderns wanted to be new, fast. This urgency demanded that the old be eliminated. ‘I am dynamite,’ Nietzsche bellowed. Echoing this, the French incendiary Louis Aragon remarked that he could think of nothing more ...”

“... into cowardice, and at an inconceivable price. This, as much as anything else, accounts for his self-loathing, and the masochistic pleasure he seems to take in it. He is a shameless voyeur who hasn’t a shred of respect for Genevieve; a lecher who fantasises about his sister and the 16-year-old daughter of the owner of the Persian restaurant where he works ...”

“... era who directly challenged white privilege by supporting equal citizenship rights and colonial self-determination. All were, as the historian of anthropology George Stocking put it, ‘evolutionists’: that is, they assimilated ‘races’ to ‘stages’ of the human evolutionary past, and then assumed each had to develop separately and at its own ...”

“... he was going to go and be a hermit for a while: ‘Are you looking for God or looking for your self? she said. Can you even tell the difference any more? … Six years, she said, it’s been six years, and you leave now, at the worst time there could be, and for nothing … You are a child, she said, you always have been, and now I have two ...”

“... crush it. The Daily Mail ethos – strident, certain, mono-minded – smacks of the bully’s self-disgust. It is not a joyous newspaper, or a happy one, and Dacre’s worst effect has been to let it seem mired in the things it hates, as if society’s worst excesses were mostly an outgrowth of its own paranoid imagination. As with most warriors for ...”

“... school of belief in benevolent empire, among them Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, with their self-serving fairy tales about a post-Vietnam US internationalism organised around ‘complexity’, ‘interdependence’, ‘regime theory’ and ‘liberal institutionalism’. But his main focus is Gramsci, who as general secretary of the PCI was interned by ...”

“... One​ of many remarkable aspects of Egypt’s 2011 revolt was its intense self-consciousness. It wasn’t just that the sit-ins were being broadcast 24 hours a day on satellite TV, with huge screens mounted in Tahrir Square so that the crowd could watch itself writhing in pixels, like the mosh pit in a nightclub ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he wants to change his own life.’But undoing false narratives, in the hope that a more authentic self might somehow be located, requires a repositioning on two fronts: in the way a person chooses to interact with and represent the world, and in the way they make sense of their past. At home in Cambridge, Tunde decides to shower with a bar of black soap. He ...”

“... freedom. What entangles us and so endangers that freedom is our propensity to be deceived by a self-indulgent resort to myth and fantasy, a resort which makes us the all too easy victims of those who use myth and fantasy to enchant us. But already in the early novels two kinds of progress are evident. One is in understanding how it is the novelist as well ...”

“... seem like cards drawn from a tarot deck, a modern arcana of types. A stuntman is an ‘alternate self’ who takes ‘the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity’. One could say that G, by painting upside-down works, is a stuntman of a different kind. Another G, a Black ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... organs of propaganda in Iraq. This view is that the royal family in Kuwait has been corrupt and self-serving, and has shamelessly and cynically stratified society within the Amirate. Such criticism has found some sympathy among those inside Kuwait. As one Palestinian living and working there told me, Kuwait is a place of insiders and outsiders. If you are ...”

“... context, ‘you can’t see the join’), and have made their book potentially useful to the self-instructing student and the self-mistrusting teacher by providing a little programme of exercises at the end of each chapter.* Pedagogically, the book is admirable, and will surely enable readers ‘to understand something ...”

“... it is worth quoting Habermas’s position at some length: ‘After Auschwitz our national self-consciousness can be derived only from the better traditions of our history, a history that is not unexamined but appropriated critically. The context of our national life, which once permitted incomparable injury to the substance of human solidarity, can be ...”