“... like to be as free as Westerners are, but are socially trained to think of freedom as regrettable self-indulgence. To take up such individual rights as free speech and free association can feel like putting one’s selfish desires before the interests of some group or of society as a whole. It is, as a high provincial official told Schell, ‘a clash between ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mrs Trilling has some sympathy for the black demonstrators – she admires their dignity and self-respect, and thinks they have a case against American society – but thinks the white student radicals were just spoilt and ungrateful kids, peeing on the carpet that welcomed them. One of these delinquents, famously photographed during the occupation ...”

“... reinforced by the resonant speaking voice from deep down in the diaphragm, confident and self-assured. When he spoke, his swift-moving lips, thick and red like two ripe fruits, evoked luxury and youthfulness; yet sometimes, thin as filaments of blood, they depicted death and carnage.’ In addition to the nature of the hankerings, the prose style ...”

“... capable of inordinate deceit and crafty manipulation. Yet the sense of being freed into a sexual self was a very powerful educational experience in Wharton’s life; without it one doubts whether she could have written The Age of Innocence (1920). Her major success, however, The House of Mirth, was published in 1905, well before the Fullerton affair. By the ...”

“... Almost nonchalantly Verghese draws us towards devastating suffering. Denial is common: initial self-deception; then rebellion against those offering treatment; and an unashamed escalation in self-endangering behaviour. But Verghese’s bleak descriptions are tinged with humour. The pecker-pickling Texas truckers who ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... some lasting from noon to dawn, repeatedly insisting that detailed prescriptions would be self-defeating; that the right method was to set out the goals the courts were to achieve. By the spring of 1804 the whole project was law. The fresh codification now under way under the great conseiller Braibant is the task of a decade where Bonaparte’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s self-serving book, Six Crises (a ‘campaign book’ for an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of Darkness at Noon or ...”

“... water has always held the magical power to cure. Somehow or other it transmits its own self-regenerating power to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression and come out a whistling idiot.’ With his trusty snorkel, he stakes out the whole of watery England for his Grail quest. Like ...”

“... what spirit, Edward Wortley recognised himself in the ironic portrait of Waitfort. The widow’s self-portrait, it should be said, is hardly more flattering. While the piece does speak up for women, it is more interested in talking back to Addison. Even before Pope’s attacks on her in the Dunciad and elsewhere made ‘confutation ... a leading imperative ...”

“... to another. The book struck me as tedious, certainly not dirty in any obvious way, and massively self-important. In those unpolitical days of mine, I had no idea what I had really bought: a fruit of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and one of its many subsidiaries. A few years later, when I got my first job at Columbia University in 1963, I met many of ...”