“... and indignation at his treatment by the establishment, continued to exhibit a rare and often self-deprecatory wit. Consider his account of the start, in 1827, of his life-long passion for Shakespeare: ‘As I came out of Hamlet, shaken to the core by the experience, I vowed I should not expose myself a second time to the flame of Shakespeare’s genius ...”

“... prince is looking for a princess. His ageing mother clearly won’t do for the part. Blinkered by self-absorption, he is not prepared to notice on his return form Paris signs of the heart disease which abruptly ends Mrs Percy’s patient life. Lewis is devastated, and bewildered. His educated idealism has not adapted him for domesticity and grief. ‘Life ...”

“... callow Yankee ornithologist, a mild obsessive with a strong sense of timing and no instinct of self-protection whatever; he goes where the bird song calls him and reports his experiences with what seems like false naivety but may be the expression of genuine innocence. His previous book was a collection of random if passionate notes on owl sightings in ...”

“... then, and tells us that avoiding it has become a preoccupation now. Nevertheless, behind his self-castigation a certain complacency seems to lurk. The impression may partly be created by the mature Julian’s intermittent reflections on life in general: these tend towards a weary fatalism of tone which in turn creates an exonerating context for the ...”

“... passage about ‘the workmanship of the understanding’ (earning for Locke Nelson Goodman’s self-description as ‘constructionalist’). In a paper published some years ago Ayers seemed to concede that with the advent of chemistry and molecular biology we had found inner constitutions – and so Locke, writing what was valid in his day, is no longer ...”

“... for women. Family resources enabled her to acquire a university education, and she was financially self-sufficient throughout her long career. A friendship with George Gissing (they corresponded at least once a week for ten years) admitted her to a world of artistic achievement. She embodies the independence of the new woman. Yet she emerges from Jane ...”

“... listened for. The O is both something and nothing, origin and omega, mother and rooted sense of self. Heaney consigns himself to living with its equivocations, in the fullness of absence. The haw is not a lantern, but he will live by its light, ‘its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on’. The round O’s in the book evoke maternity, ...”

“... puzzlement or blankness can be her only response. She has immense physical resilience and self-confidence, an alarming urge to dominate, and a combative and powerful presence. But she is also uninformed, endlessly self-deceived and, though by no means unintelligent, seemingly incapable of intellectual reflection or ...”

“... currencies are under discussion. The identity of nations is being constructed in acts of symbolic self-affirmation which are also gestures of puzzled self-discovery. The future shape of political structures in the Baltics is coloured by the ease with which independence was won. In Lithuania independence has proved the ...”

“... intertwined (as church and state came to be in Christendom); co-optation made the party too self-perpetuating, too little self-critical; and where the comforts of life were scarce, the temptation to use influence to get an unfair share was strong. The Party, like the Roman Church, became too rich, and was no longer ...”

“... he suggests, saw Italian art ‘more as a repository of motifs and ideas than as a coherent, self-conscious system of artistic values’. Or again, writing of the influence of Rubens, Brown notes the advantages as well as the limitations of what he calls ‘second-hand stylistic transmission’. ‘The Spanish painters were inspired but not limited by ...”

“... the New Forum and the Peace and Human Rights movement. They wanted a humane, democratic GDR, a self-governing civil society and not a Western takeover. Jens Reich, one of the most intelligent and sympathetic figures of the New Forum, has said that he first experienced a GDR identity after the overthrow of Honecker and Krenz. In the year that followed few ...”

“... Louis Seynaeve, who is ten years old at the time of Munich, grows up in an enclosed and self-righteous little community in Catholic West Flanders. The Seynaeves are anti-semitic (though until the outbreak of war Louis has never set eyes on a Jew), anti-socialist, anti-French, anti-Protestant, anti-Brussels and anti-government. Their right-wing ...”

“... that morning was of German professional competence and decent seriousness and British self-love and exhibitionism. Not everyone has admired Lord Hailsham as he unquestionably admires himself. The tone is beautifully echoed in Hailsham’s account of his meeting with Khrushchev. ‘Khrushchev was a countryman to his fingertips. The only man I have ...”

“... and again in popular science books, and there is not much new here. What is new is Weinberg’s self-conscious concern for philosophical issues such as the nature of explanation, the sense in which an explanation or theory may be said to be ‘final’, and whether the end-product of science is a nice-sounding, though possibly false, story about nature, or ...”