“... claims about the ample scope of phenomena about which they can say something wise-sounding and self-consistent. The relevant question should be, not whether the favoured theory can ‘cover’ a given phenomenon, but whether it provides us with the most plausible of competing explanations. To make such a case, it is of course necessary to weigh one’s own ...”

“... a literary activity: it was a weapon. Physically, he was small and unremarkable. Socially, he was self-conscious about his background. In one of the many letters to Nancy Mitford printed here, he says he had never realised that he was not a gentleman until it had been pointed out to him by Lady Burghclere, his first mother-in-law. The tone is ironic – but ...”

“... opportunity to witness the sustained spontaneous effort of intellectual genius wrestling with its self-proposed problems.’ Perhaps this was true in many cases. But there was another kind of influence. John King, an under-graduate member of those classes and a friend, viewed Wittgenstein ‘as a man of high moral, intellectual and artistic integrity ...”

“... through the promise of free exploration and rebirth, to the blank acceptance or celebration of self-extinction. In the act of ‘discovering America’, Conrad tells us in the introductory chapter, these writers were really ‘discovering’ themselves. And yet all of them were known to be what they were, for good or ill, before they got there. What really ...”

“... and compassion as ‘drool and drivel’ – Mrs Thatcher was supremely herself. In the process of self-revelation, she managed to confirm every adverse stereotype of her style and values with which her opponents had hoped to make the electorate’s flesh creep. Nevertheless, in the event, fear of Labour exceeded fear of Mrs Thatcher. The Tory tune drowned out ...”

“... reports about the sins of the medical establishment, The American Way of Birth seems both tame and self-serving: ‘tame’ because the scandal is by now familiar, and ‘self-serving’ because it is used to validate one particular narrative of childbirth – that of Mitford herself. Her book begins with an account of the ...”

“... the classical style once proclaimed the independence of art, it has been reintroduced as a form of self-deprecation rather than self-assertion. The revivalist impulse common to fundamentalism and post-modernism is thus in neither case a simple return to the past, for in the aftermath of the modernist redistribution of the ...”

“... or atheism that makes tragic drama impossible, but chaos theory.) So Oedipus’ ultimate self-recognition is numinous and reassuring. Whereas, at the end of Lear, Nuttall suggests, Shakespeare ‘offers no such clinching final insight’, and this is part of the play’s power and, more enigmatically, of the pleasure we get from ...”

“... not suggest a single novel, let alone far-reaching, consequence of his insight. It will become self-evident he says, that reality is not co-extensive with what we can understand. Well, despite the fact that Magee hates Hume (the worst thing he can say about a philosopher is that he is a ‘regression towards Hume’), Hume thought exactly that. ‘While ...”

“... in order to perform its particular mission in the general cause of humanity. His ideal was not the self-sufficient, autarchic national state, but a ‘Europe des patries’. A look at contemporary Europe might confirm the importance of Mazzini’s vision. Is a community founded only on common interests enough? What should be the role of national states within ...”

“... Even Baudelaire, who saw dandyism as a new form of spiritual aristocracy, disdained self-regarding display: ‘Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance.’ For Baudelaire’s dandy too, ‘perfection in dress consists in absolute simplicity.’ All ...”

“... word cist (‘clean’) after it fell in April. And the unhygienic militia which did the job, the self-described Chetniks of the warlord Voytislav Seselj, also freely used the happy expression. The ‘camps’ which were the inescapable minor counterpart of this process have at least served to concentrate the flickering European and American mind upon a ...”

“... it ‘pares the questions down to their essence, forcing us to think about what we mean by the self, whether we are our genes’. ‘If a clone is created,’ she asks, ‘how could its soul be different from the soul of the person who is being cloned?’ (This is only a small sample of the many similar passages that frame the central ...”

“... man: his profoundly anti-Wildean commitment to the importance of being earnest in an age of irony, self-consciously stylish order and allusively ambiguous myth. For Lawrence was undeniably earnest, despite his famous gift for mimicry, his high spirits, his sense of the comic. His Modernism – eventually his anti-Modernism – sought in all seriousness to ...”

“... By separating them, we raise what for Bergson is the pseudo-problem of an ‘underlying’ self whose successive ‘states’ these supposedly are; but there is no need in Bergsonism (any more than in Buddhism) for any such spooky supernumerary, since each contourless ‘I’ simply goes with the flow, borne along on the crest of its history. For all ...”