“... Friedrich Strauss and countless others were just then demonstrating. Romantic conceptions of the self and wissenschaftliche approaches to the Bible combined to produce a liberal theology according to which the Bible was a cultural document rather than a series of commands, and the individual soul less an object of judgment than a site for religious ...”

“... at embarrassing length before responding with a blunt or irrelevant few words. With the garrulous, self-absorbed Wagner, he ‘stayed as good as dumb for almost an hour’, so Wagner complained, deciding that Schumann was ‘a highly gifted musician, but an impossible person’. This reticence made teaching difficult. A student at the Leipzig ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of copious draughts of wine and tea so as to investigate the resulting sweats. Such bodily self-management was what the natural philosophy of the day demanded: compare the Venetian physiologist Sanctorius sitting daily in his self-devised ‘weighing chair’ while measuring his own excreta, or Newton poking a needle ...”

“... that other’s; make yourselves friends by means of the riches of iniquity, for the wealth of the self is the health of the self exchanged.A series of poetic dramas – about the martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer, about Satan’s attempt to father a child, about the personification of Chelmsford – offer opaque allegories of ...”

“... than Mustafa Barzani. It’s the predicament of smaller nations that they must bestow (calculated, self-interested) love on their supposed protectors but rarely see it reciprocated. When things begin to unravel it’s always the weaker side that loses. The year was 1975, and the agreement to which Barzani refers was an accord that the shah of Iran had just ...”

“... 1934, Hitler has been chancellor for a year, and Heidegger is beginning to take stock. There is no self-doubt here: ‘For years I have known myself to be on the right path.’ But there is a nagging sense that the Nazis may not have fully appreciated the importance of his thinking. Stuck in the positivistic biologism of the 19th century, they have not grasped ...”

“... NGOs, local public and private sector institutions and those (not many) who are successfully self-employed, usually merchants. People try to help one another, but charity isn’t the simple, unencumbered act it once was. A friend from a prominent Gaza family described his dilemma: ‘After paying my taxes to Hamas, the new fees that spring up all the ...”

“... the major themes in the fiction of Richard Ford. What engages him is the churning of the conscious self, as changeable as the weather on an iffy day. What kind of a day is such a day? Soft or threatening? What kind of people were Ford’s mother and father, whose inner lives might offer strong clues to the meaning of the author’s own? That question has been ...”

“... would come to know, over the next few months as ‘the fascination’. That sounds melodramatic, self-indulgent, but it was the word that came to mind then and as time went by it seemed more accurate than anything else. Somewhere, at the core of this terrifying paralysis and helplessness, there was a fascination, a taste, not of death, exactly, but of ...”

“... to canonisation, eventually granted by Pope Alexander III in 1161. There was a strong element of self-interest in the process, designed to promote the status of Westminster Abbey, Edward’s foundation and burial place, but there is more to be said about the speed and means by which the Edward of recent history ‘faded into the image of a saint’.The real ...”

“... of the moment by retreating into a monkish solitude, or searching for authenticity in the self-mythologising self-care movement. Emira does both. She longs to work with her hands, as her family does: her dad is a beekeeper, her mum binds books, her little brother is an award-winning barista and her sister is a ...”