“... story itself becomes a quite different one. All those ‘European histories’ which are really self-congratulatory chronicles of Western Civilisation – with obligatory references to dark, peripheral events like the Partitions of Poland or the reforms of Peter the Great – now fa1l into oblivion, not because they are incomplete but because they are ...”

“... ex-geeks or adorable social failures who can’t help blurting out what they think. It’s comic self-deprecation that makes the outrageous lovable. But Gallop takes herself very seriously, and her image as a femme fatale is not made more persuasive by the gratitude she shows towards friendly passers-by like Scott, while her indignation (‘I worried that ...”

“... writings survive. There was Saul, the rigorous persecutor of the Jesus cult. There was Paul, the self-appointed apostle to the Gentiles, one among several such ascetic missionaries, often in disagreement with each other. There is the Paul of the seven or so surviving genuine letters in the New Testament; and there is the Paul of the faked letters ...”

“... he came to visit.Our Booker chairwoman would not have been disgusted by Yerofeev – he is never self-consciously nasty or conscientiously obscene. At the mention of his name in our literary chit-chat she merely looked exasperated. A drinking man is not a funny subject for a Russian woman. She was disinclined to see the joke, and the immense writing skill ...”

“... an important part in the forging of this class-consciousness, which was inseparable from ethnic self-respect. Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism, often dismissed as a misconceived irrelevancy in American black history, is here treated with much greater respect as one manifestation of a rising national consciousness which is class-orientated in principle ...”

“... commonly rely upon a concept of desert, which itself depends upon a wholly mysterious concept of self-determination, and I do not see how there is any place for such concepts if, to the extent to which an action is not completely determined by physical or mental causes, it has to be viewed as occurring by chance. On this point I agree with Honderich, who ...”

“... conforming, in her struggle from faith to free-thinking, to a recognisable pattern. But Olive was self-created. It’s true that African Farm is, in some ways, much what might be expected from a young woman in the 1870s, jilted, working as a governess, writing in a leaky farmstead by candlelight. The heroine, Lyndall, is very small, with beautiful eyes (Olive ...”

“... street theatre in all this – people arguing for the sake of argument, rediscovering the joy of self-expression after years of self-repression. I went for the first time just before the Party Conference in July. At six o’clock, the square was already packed with people. In one of the largest groups, an impressive young ...”

“... the other hand, lost at least as many admirers as Cabrera Infante for his continuing (some thought self-interested) loyalty to Castro after the show-trial of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. And Octavio Paz forced many readers to make an awkward distinction between his political views and his writing when, late in life and in the name of order, he ...”

“... is the most important variable. And hardly anyone now believes what seems to me historically self-evident: that the best way of solving a social problem is to throw money at it. What is important here is not that New Labour denies something self-evident, but that the Labour Party, individual exceptions apart, has ...”

“... aspire to be) junkies, the damage that anorexic and beautiful models inflict on the consumer’s self-image and, on the other hand, the social progress fashion is making by giving stylistic space to those not usually represented in ads. There is comparatively little discussion of the self-esteem or health of the workers ...”

“... Muslim world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims. Anti-American Iranian Shi‘ite Muslims were self-evidently bad; anti-Communist Sunni Muslims self-evidently good. The United States and Pakistan were the main powers behind the ‘anti-Soviet jihad’ but China also joined in, not only helping arm the Mujahidin but ...”

“... conscription of long-dead people into our own causes; and, worst of all, our pharisaical self-satisfaction at always being historically on the right side. Thus we adopt towards past people, our poor relations, an attitude of pity tinged with contempt, reserving praise for those ‘ahead of their time’ who, we think, were striving to be more like ...”

“... lets Eunice down his ‘souvenirs’, those ‘exercises of memory’ so precious to his sense of self, would ‘stink’. ‘A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.’ Ijah makes no propaganda for what he has become – a legal and political adviser to bankers on foreign loans. He prefers to interest himself in the ...”

“... to think that a sign-relation is built into nature is to revert to the idea that there are ‘self-identifying objects’ and ‘species’ there ... Such an idea made sense in the context of a Medieval world view ... In the context of a 20th-century world view, by contrast, to say in one’s most intimidating tone of voice ‘I believe that causal ...”