“... doted on brothers and followed their careers anxiously, not being given similar opportunities for self-expression through gainful employment. Yes, the Victorian world was filled with status-seekers who complained incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously ...”

“... For biography still flourishes – albeit on a reduced scale and with diminished intellectual self-confidence – both within and without the walls of academe. In one guise, it has been reincarnated as prosopography, which stresses backgrounds rather than opinions, collective behaviour in preference to individual diversity, in the (usually vain) hope of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... director at the time of Webb’s death in 1947: ‘Our founder was wiser than most and less self-regarding. Having set the School on its feet, he never attempted to impose his own views.’ But not through mere modesty. Webbian claims to superior expertise were in a sense institutionalised with the foundation of the School. Dahrendorf goes so far as to ...”

“... its innovative goals and practices, its productive methods, distribution systems and theoretical self-representations – all these things distinctly recall the situation of the early Modernist poetries which Jack Butler Yeats denounced. Indeed, what he had to say of those poets loved of Ezra Pound has been said, and continues to be said, of the poets and ...”

“... repress a harsh answer, to confess to a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defence, in gentle submission’. The advice of The Mother’s Assistant and Young Lady’s Friend was ‘Always conciliate,’ and The Lady’s Amaranth stated that a woman governs by ‘persuasion ... The empire of woman is an empire of softness ... her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”