“... be ‘such a questionable shape’ On essentialism Ayer is uncompromisingly faithful to his early self and, as in much else, to Hume. The only necessities he is prepared to recognise, apart from the formally logical or mathematical, are those which analytically link, or separate, descriptions. Here he is, at least superficially, at odds with current doctrines ...”

“... usual sense of sin and sexual guilt. On a working holiday in France with a husband whom she finds self-absorbed and unsympathetic, she is planning to break the news to him at any moment that she is leaving him for her lover in California. But Alex, as the book opens, runs straight into a disastrous accident: a motorboat rams him head-on while he is ...”

“... have when awake at dawn or sleepless in the small hours of the morning, or whenever the faculty of self-deception that so often insulates us from real life is temporarily in abeyance. For me, the gravest of these black morning thoughts is that the future of England and, ecumenically speaking, of the world depends upon the decisions of party politicians such as ...”

“... are familiar to excess with its traits of impatience and hysteria, arbitrariness and that heedless self-assertion which goes under the mystifying name of ‘will power’, to which is added a strong does of self-pity: ‘He says that the weeks since 20 July [1944] have been the worst of his life. He has fought and won a ...”

“... of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves’. He believes that the proper method for historians today is the same as it has always been, at least since the 19th century, when the rules of ...”

“... artistic director says, ‘Sir! You know this music better than you know your so-called self. Make every effort to breathe naturally and your voice will be buoyed-up as upon a great cushion, your voice will spring as upon a trampoline! Breathe from the very balls of you, sir! We want the bright, the focused, the ringing top. Mr Lucchesi! Remember ...”

“... in the imagination, Stevens said, ‘is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains’.Stevens himself later wrote that ‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,’ and we need slightly longer examples, perhaps, to ...”

“... invade the older social frameworks of the large household. Conceding too much in an oddly self-abasing conclusion to his expansive account of literary servants, Bruce Robbins declares himself ‘ready to grant that I have not been talking about what is necessarily most complex, sophisticated, profound or even interesting in the English novel’. Do ...”

“... of ‘psychological’ explanations of social failure and contempt for those who ‘wallowed’ in self-analysis are wholly out of tune with the current explosion of ‘counselling’ (the fastest-growing of the new parapsychological professions). Her suggestion that in certain circumstances wage-reductions were a necessary tool of rational economic planning ...”

“... the seriousness of the situation.’ Recent experience in Bosnia, though, suggests that in self-defence even artillery fire can be compatible with traditional British notions of minimum force and peace-keeping. General Sir Peter de la Billière, commander of the British forces in the Gulf, is more obviously a Clausewitzian, arguing that ‘once they ...”

“... wider than that of a mere transition from colonial to para-colonial institutions of African self-government, such as occurred around 1960. They are not thinking, that is, of the ending of the era of imperialism tout court, for they are too deeply versed in their subject to suppose that financial and trading imperialism can be anywhere near its ...”

“... Zapata). It was characterised throughout by a quite astonishing degree of duplicity, cynicism, self-seeking, and uninhibited recourse to violence. Indeed, it so often appears to be no more than a protracted slugging-match between rival caudillos that it can be (and has been) questioned whether it should be called a revolution at all. Alan Knight, whose ...”

“... medicine satisfies an immature hankering to play the big guy, basking in glory, the apparent self-sacrifices involved assuaging feelings of guilt and providing ego-defence. The heroics of the operating-theatre or the ‘fire brigade’ drama of the emergency call gratify Boy’s Own Paper cravings for adventure, and above all the authority structures of ...”

“... the very few writers down under who could be fanciful by nature, without giving any impression of self-consciousness. But in fact realism in the usual sense was not what anyone produced, for Australian writing took everything for granted – the empty country, the dust, the trees, the urban scene above all – because taking things for granted is the stance ...”

“... book. In the upshot Pauline hardly behaves sensibly, but she has reached a measure of self-approval, which is hard come by in Rathmines. In the fiction of Richard Yates we are down among the half-lives (Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Young Hearts Crying): New Yorkers who are hopeful as kids, humiliated as adolescents, uncommunicative as ...”