“... 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 ...”

“... their social origins from within even the bottom half of 17th-ccntury society and most were so self-consciously unconventional as to defy generalisations based on their behaviour. This work became part of a larger project in which Hill sought to represent the dispossessed throughout history. He identified himself with such ‘radicals’, once instructing ...”

“... abject misery. But Cage’s Ben Sanderson is beyond agony or remorse, if not quite the concomitant self-pity. He wants out of life and not to bore anyone on the way. Weaving down the path to his doom with an unsteady sway of the hips, Cage reveals the charm of his character through his politeness to a prostitute, Sera (Elisabeth Shue), whom he accidentally ...”

“... of money and heroism. Whatever Lochiel thought he was up to, he was not pursuing his rational self-interest within the law in the approved fashion of The Wealth of Nations. And whatever Smith thought he was up to writing that sentence, he must have seen, in the crass juxtaposition of two exact quantities, how useless money (even sterling money) is to ...”

“... have told how, even now, survivors of the Far Eastern war have been paying thousands of pounds to self-publishing firms to bring out their fifty-year-old diaries or memoirs. For decades such accounts – some, supposedly, written at the urging of psychiatrists – have been turning up on publishers’ ‘slush piles’; scores more must have been despairingly ...”

“... much of a look in; it is the texts that he deploys, most elegantly, to illustrate the discourse of self-indulgence. Even then there are questions of typicality. Were the Athenians really obsessed with fish? We think so, because so much of this literature survives only in quotation, and in quotation by the great philologist of food, Athenaios. At his fantasy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... knew what boys got up to but dared not define it. ‘Ah, boys, boys, what a glorious thing is self-mastery!’ is as near as he got. His ideal young male was ‘a man strong enough to roll over a bullock on the emu plains of Australia with one blow of the fist’. Such prowess was not to be gained by thinking in bed, a temporary cure for which was ten ...”

“... What this pure Geistesgeschichte underplays is a sense of context. Greenough recognised, partly in self-criticism, that in a new country the old classical ‘character’ would not do: America, he says, must find its own forms. Only in a continent with an infinity of practical tasks before it and a boundless biology of its own to explore could ‘form follows ...”

“... the mythical women that Ruskin identifies with Rose La Touche). Loyalty can also be a form of self – assertion. In Ruskin’s case it implies an indifference to changing tastes and values that made him repellent to the literary generation that followed him, and often makes him seem an alien presence now. The central reason is the unremittingly religious ...”

“... Phineas G. imposes: ‘I suspect that much of what we stigmatise as irresolution is due to our Self being by no means one and indivisible, and that we do not care to sacrifice the Self of the moment for a different one.’ Psychological incoherence is interesting enough, but why display it on an index card rather than ...”

“... Goldsmith, Sir Joseph Banks, Burney, Garrick, Sheridan, Gibbon and Adam Smith. In their role as self-appointed custodians of culture, literary clubs combined some of the functions of the Paris salon and the university the capital lacked. There was no true continental equivalent to the British obsession with the institution Johnson’s Dictionary defined as ...”