“... 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 ...”

“... but something deeper, not so much an intellectual as a psychological limitation: a capacity for self-deception with far-reaching political consequences.‘India was in my blood and there was much in her that instinctively thrilled me,’ he told his readers.She is very lovable and none of her children can forget her wherever they go or whatever strange fate ...”

“... under perestroika had first taken outspoken nationalist form. But unlike Russian nationalism, a self-destructive and anti-democratic force that could only lead to the end of the USSR, in Estonia there was no contradiction between the national and democratic movements. All three Baltic states would become democratic republics, but of the trio, elections had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... she casts at least provisional doubt on both the soul and the judgment of her voluble and somewhat self-intoxicated narrator, as he assembles the remains of his disintegrating family for us. He has been in the North and knows his Thoreau, so he starts by dismantling one ruined house in order to fortify and then inhabit another. And from this fastness he ...”

“... skilful thriller – Le Carré is certainly at the top of the class – and add the elements of self-seeking, cynicism, betrayal and pointlessness with an air of rueful integrity, a suggestion that your respect for the truth makes you write it this way, however distasteful and jarring it may be for the reader. Of course the reader loves it, and the circuit ...”

“... gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s scepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.’ Exactly. This is something we all learn at our first editor’s knee. So why does it take Ms Malcolm 144 ...”

“... to the folklore of the Cotswolds, London and Warwickshire, occasionally straying outside these self-imposed borders but always arguing with rigour and exactitude. Particularly helpful is the way in which key concepts such as ‘popular’ and ‘puritan’ receive a detailed explanation of the meanings they have attracted; the French derivations of some ...”

“... Pontalis uses a style basically resistant to a certain form of inquiry in the construction of a self-portrait that is itself the fruit of that form of inquiry? After all, Pontalis is no innocent in these matters. He is a survivor of Sartre and Lacan, the two most ferocious opponents that psychoanalysis has had to endure: Sartre with his insistence on ...”