“... lousy desert that made up her picture of village life. She lived like a prisoner, an urban refugee self-immured behind the vicarage’s bars and shutters. None of my new school friends were allowed in the house, of course. You could get into the vicarage garden via a side yard, or by climbing over the walls, and that was the way we did it. The whole thing was ...”

“... who suffers from it, and people in life are much more mysterious than people in literature. Any self-respecting student can tell you what King Lear’s madness was all about, or Lady Macbeth’s, or even Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ (true madness or feigned?). But I have ransacked the resources of Freud and Jung, cognitive and transactional ...”

“... Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’. People open themselves to exploitation when the sense of self-worth that derives from doing something they believe in comes up against a hierarchical authority that is secretive, arbitrary and ruthless. Cruel optimism afflicts the colleague who agrees to yet another change of policy in the hope that it will be the last ...”

“... provides a clue to the puzzle about what sort of thing these books are: quest narratives, with the self as the quest-object. A moment later, as she imagines the adults calling down the rabbit hole, the same question takes on a different tone: ‘Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down ...”

“... in FDR’s inaugural address, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ written by the self-help guru Napoleon Hill, author of the 1937 runaway bestseller, Think and Grow Rich. The president knew how to carry out Hill’s positive-thinking agenda. His first official act was a masterstroke of spin: he closed the banks to prevent them failing and ...”

“... a moral turn, not least inside the Dutch Reformed Church, which fatally undermined the regime’s self-confidence? And was not that turn inspired by the example of Mandela in the ultimate non-violent situation, banged up on Robben Island? What about those equally startling velvet revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, or more recently in Burma? Most ...”

“... preferences, and The Whole Harmonium is one such. Stevens is one of those apparently fortunate, self-standing poets who are not greatly involved with the styles or personalities of their time, whose work sets no puzzles and makes a sufficiently vivid impression all by itself. It’s hard to disagree with Elsie, who after her husband’s death sold his books ...”

“... at the time, and have been preserved whole, what you find is a pervasive sentimentality, a strong self-referential tendency, a structure of iron logic. The Incorruptible was also the unpredictable. He was a fissiparous bundle of contradictions. He idealised ‘the people’ and profoundly distrusted anyone who claimed to speak for them. He distrusted the very ...”

“... no institutional continuity. The theme of wounded male narcissism – the mower on a hot day mown, self-injured – may be one way of giving imaginative shape to what it feels like to live inside a new political bubble that’s stretched to bursting point. But let us first address what is known about the life of That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted ...”

“... classes whose sequestered vita contemplativa could accommodate a more embracing care of the bodily self and whose self-presentation traditionally worked in elements of secular hypochondria or sacred asceticism. The tone became more hectoring; blanket prohibitions took the place of qualified advice; custom was generally ...”

“... Watt had stayed in his nomadic search for health. Humphry was a promising teenage poet and a self-taught experimental chemist who claimed to have overthrown Lavoisier’s caloric theory of heat and to have achieved other significant advances in knowledge using apparatus assembled from a broken clock and an enema tube rescued from a local shipwreck. As ...”

“... another. Kissinger, for whom the history of the period is little more than a grab-bag for his own self-glorification as an actor in it, can be forgiven for maintaining that China’s war on Vietnam was a vital blow against the Soviet Union and a stepping-stone to victory in the Cold War. That the Sino-American alliance he negotiated, and Deng escalated, had ...”

“... considerable poetic powers, this writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being.’ Paracelsus (1835) was better received, especially in liberal periodicals, and more widely read: people began to talk of Browning as a Coming Poet. This moderate success must have puffed up his ...”

“... of the King of Brobdingnag, as a pernicious race of little odious vermin. Even Richard Rorty, the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do’. Torture has posed a problem for philosophers. Simple utilitarianism has notorious difficulties in explaining why torture or other such abuse is bad in ...”

“... is born out of exchanges and thrives on differences. In this sense, ‘national culture’ is a self-contradiction, and ‘multiculturalism’ a pleonasm. The death of culture lies in self-centredness, self-sufficiency and isolation. (Here, for instance, the first concern – it seems ...”