“... 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 ...”

“... this latest bulletin have to say? For Paul Johnson, intellectuals are conspicuously ruthless and self-interested males. They are secular: he makes use of the term ‘secular intellectual’ as if there were other varieties, but none is exhibited. They are violent and drunken. They are ungrateful to the ‘kind’ persons who assist them, and who are ...”

“... he can stay off the streets, steer clear of heroin and crack, and keep his nose clean: intelligent self-defence is as much the impulse in this account as hungry aggression. The mottos on the gym wall back him up: ‘Do Sports not Drugs,’ ‘It is Better to Build Men than to Mend Boys.’ For most young fighters who want to turn professional, the prospect of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but it is clear that in writing these chapters, she made a conscious attempt to avoid both self-pity and recrimination. Occasionally, the lengths to which she goes to be positive and even-handed are startling. ‘Slavery had its dark side as well as its bright side,’ for example, is a rather incongruous remark. She describes her own master, who sent ...”

“... sense of the authorial presence racing to snare memory beyond memory – without a hint of the self-promoting strategist faking the odds to ensure a final apotheosis. The plot will be familiar to readers of ghosted East End gangster memoirs: bother with the law, church, boxing club, billet in the White Tower, Colchester, battalion champion, guardhouse, on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... then there seems to be no compelling reason for the experienced data-flow to have any kind of self-consistency. Why should those particular data flow at that particular place and time? Ferris himself states, only a few lines away from the previous quote: ‘I assume that there are things out there.’ That is the statement of a (non-naive) realist. How ...”

“... skills, patriotism and capacity for hard work against his tolerance of corruption and his self-centred, erratic style. Anyone trying to form a judgment about his years in power must also confront his disdain for educated people, his impatience with advice, his craving for approval, his fondness for revenge, his cynicism and his flamboyance. The life ...”

“... viewed over a period of some three hundred years. There are 12 sections, each one working as a self-contained short story while also forming part of a larger narrative which is constantly looking back upon and adding to itself. These stories are meaty, dramatic, suspenseful: they deal in issues of betrayal, secrecy, discovery and deception, two ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”