“... 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 ...”

“... on their results: ‘In a country which ... after the end of the Second World War bases its moral self-understanding upon the myth of the Resistance, completely different myths suddenly spring up and transform what is “real”. This result alone is worth the cost of the research.’ How so? It is not news that for a long time the French exaggerated their ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... affect; he likes being made to feel ‘glidey’ and ‘nice’; he’s funny about the artists’ self-mythologising and bad behaviour, and irony for him is natural. The presiding angel would appear to be Gertrude Stein, in Alice B. Toklas mode, fauxnaive and paratactic, artless and kooky, the godmother of Adrian Mole. But his favourite art critic, as he ...”

“... are by Schipper’s definition conservative, and they present their tendentious opinions as self-evident truths about human nature. Layered with caustic, tongue-in-cheek ambiguity, gnomic utterances are like oracles in their contradictions and double entendres. Schipper’s working definition of the proverb ignores the issue of gnomes, but her ...”

“... and motivations of British officials’ had destroyed the ‘myths’ of the efficiency and ‘self-sacrificial esprit de corps’ of the ICS. The main problem with Spangenberg’s ‘scrutiny’ is that it ignored almost all the private papers of ICS officers that he could easily have studied. Yet the limitations of the thesis did not deter a bevy of ...”

“... themselves. This exhibition asks both, without labouring the point or falling away from self-awareness into self-regard. In the early part of the show, we move from images of forest savages, hybrids and wild women, up through prints of humans bubbling away in cooking pots (Grands Voyages de Théodore de ...”