“... 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 ...”

“... exclude flexibility and intimacy and can in any case be deceptive. Crystals of agency and self-interest can precipitate out of an apparently neutral solution. Both Atonement and Sweet Tooth could be categorised as masked first-person narratives, since the impersonal authority of the story being told unravels towards the end of each book, with the ...”

“... without it being ‘fine writing’ as so much pastoral writing is. What it is, though it’s self-serving to say so, is a commentary on the last speech from Forty Years On: ‘Were we closer to the ground as children or is the grass emptier now?’20 June. When from 1944-45 we lived in Guildford, we often ate (had to eat, the truth of it) in the British ...”

“... them altogether. He has become a martyr figure somewhat after the fashion of Schoenberg, also self-appointed to a role of revolutionary innovator; the special prize Boulez has paid is not increasing isolation but creative sterility – compositions have flowed ever more slowly from his pen. (Répons, 1980, for ensemble and live electronics, is his only ...”

“... calling him a ‘storyteller’, meaning that he wrote books that are both compelling and showily self-aware. Calvino himself embraced the description. The Uses of Literature, a selection of his non-fiction published in English in 1986, opens: ‘It all began with the first storyteller of the tribe.’ He is also called a fabulist, as much for his narrative ...”

“... people under the heel of American imperialism’ nor a ‘national minority’ in need of separate self-determination. His travels had moderated those views, but if he now recognised that racial oppression was endemic and transnational, he was still certain that it was shaped by local conditions and cultures, in ways that would dictate different ...”

“... has just seven academic staff and a handful of students; its chancellor is the psychologist and self-styled ‘professor against political correctness’, Jordan Peterson. Marshall’s son, Winston, has given guest lectures at the University of Austin in Texas, a new university that claims to focus on free speech and the ‘fearless pursuit of ...”

“... although conceived as a ‘counter-commemoration’, his seven volumes had been integrated into a self-indulgent heritage culture, of whose vices he had always been well aware, but which would remain pervasive as long as France had not found a firm new footing in the world. This ingenious sophistry could not conceal that the whole enterprise of Les Lieux de ...”

“... collaborations,gaining or losing significant traits, an endlessly augmenting dish?My single self sickens, understanding itselfas slave to DNA – all the blood-flesh agonies of loveto end as a husk on your knees as I’m now on my knees –something about how the crickets contract in death, and the heat,and my own lack of volition, desire and its ...”