“... origins in New England Puritanism, and the premium it placed on the individual’s powers of self-examination. In a number of the ‘contrarian’ essays collected in The Death of Adam (1998), Robinson mounts a vigorous defence of the Puritans and their legacy, and she shares with Reverend Ames an abiding respect for the most influential early theorist ...”

“... that have come about since the publication of Modern Ireland. This is not only because they are self-evidently part of a shift towards the tolerant pluralism that any self-respecting liberal must welcome (and even any self-respecting conservative – it would be hard to find anyone in ...”

“... a zone of languorous, ineffectual, hedonist, perfumed sensuality, tinged with godlessness and self-indulgent materialism, decadent, unmanly. In short, it is deserving of conquest and rule by the capable, virile energies of Western bureaucrats. This variegated history is told in The Persian Sensation: ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ in the West, at ...”

“... republican institutions is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independence.’ However much she yearned to see the anarchist movement grow out of its enfeebling isolation, she refused to violate her principles by engaging in the political process. ‘Universal suffrage,’ Proudhon had said, ‘is the ...”

“... and intellectualist Broch wrote in that mid-century Eliotic way of the poems’ ‘suppression of self’. Indeed, their experiential component was close to zero: they had no calories – but they made the reader feel warm. They had no smell, but they were perfume all right. So distant and numinous were they that finding anything as vulgar as titles for them ...”

“... many were clerics. Men of science were seen as uniquely virtuous, given to stoic fortitude and self-denial in the service of truth, not material gain, public fame or political power. By the 18th century, the centralised nation-state gave systematic institutional forms to the mobilisation of technical expertise. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a ...”

“... that stemmed from principle, and to transform the principles of his enemies into displays of self-interest or desperation. In doing the latter he could turn out corrosive invective. One contemporary said: ‘As for his writings, there is as much difference between them and finer Invectives, as there is between a man cut with a Rasor, and spew’d ...”

“... acquired state power has been overshadowed by the extraordinary story of the rise and fall or self-transformation of the regimes inspired by the October Revolution. Within little more than 30 years of Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station, Russia had become a superpower, and one third of humanity was ruled by Communist parties. There had been nothing ...”

“... are closer to the attitude of the artist-photographer Claude Cahun, who staged a series of self-portraits in all kinds of personae, and wrote a little book of Heroines, in which Helen of Troy begins her tale: ‘I know I am very ugly, but I try to forget it. I play at being this beautiful young girl.’ When Angela Carter reworked the myth of Helen of ...”

“... The culture of torture thus encompasses both prisoners and guards. It must be hard to preserve self-control when one has suffered from or been threatened with some of the treatment one can now hand out to those assumed to be enemies. The second source is more banal and even more frightening: the influence of movies and television. As one interviewee puts ...”

“... In The Dying Animal, Kenny Kepesh’s ‘good’ behaviour is a response to his fear of losing his self-image as a good person: ‘He lives in fear of a woman telling him he’s not [admirable].’ In Indignation, Marcus is never morally concerned with ‘wrongdoing’, only with getting caught. Good behaviour is just a code, determined by collective fear. The ...”

“... Vegetarians, we say,​ are self-righteous and humourless; or fussy and weird; or like Hitler; we say that their diet makes them anaemic; that having to cater for them ruins every dinner party; that they are crazy not to eat bacon/lamb shanks/pepperoni because we evolved as hunter-gatherers; that their food smells horrible, and by implication, so do they; that it’s cruel to bring up a child vegetarian; that they are hypocrites, because how can they pretend to care about animal suffering when they still buy clothes from normal shops – and are those leather shoes by any chance? Vegetarians themselves often argue that they make us feel uncomfortable because their existence is a reminder of the cruelty and carnage that the rest of us refuse to see; there’s probably some truth in this ...”

“... The golden era of Ukrainian national identity was not tsarist Russia – where Ukrainian national self-assertion was thwarted – but the first decade of the Soviet Union, when Soviet policy in a Ukraine exhausted by war and famine was ‘indigenisation’. Ukrainian culture and language were revived, and rights to healthcare, education and social security ...”

“... he watched the ruling family and their friends doing business and enjoying themselves. Ahmed was a self-confident man, not noticeably intimidated by the sporadic shooting which was keeping most people in Tripoli off the streets. I asked him if he would consider working for me as a guide and assistant and he agreed. Tripoli had run out of petrol but he quickly ...”

“... meet him in the lobby of one of the big hotels, or in his office above a coffee bar – a tall, self-deprecatingly dashing figure with high cheekbones and exquisite shirts. He is brilliant, charming and droll, and his presence works like air-conditioning on the perspiration and stench of Thai politics. Over the course of an hour with Korn, it resolves into ...”