“... be having some trouble keeping calm as a couple of leaders of the Revolutionary Organisations – self-styled keepers of a revolutionary conscience which, in this instance, seemed to mean support for the miners against a reactionary government in thrall to the IMF – dragged out their introductory speeches. Cozma himself didn’t speak: he ranted, barely ...”

“... ends) at home – the ripples of sympathy growing weaker and weaker as they move outwards from self to tax-adviser to hamster to wife to fellow Americans and remaining mammals – was, according to Geras, refuted by the motives driving gentiles to rescue Jews from liquidation. Rescuer testimony suggested, contrary to Rorty, that shared humanity was the ...”

“... set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) ‘as a self-portrait in sound, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was an autobiography’. Then there’s the private myth about Byron: ‘I still feel the same liking, the same passion for L.B.,’ Liszt wrote to Countess Marie d’Agoult, his first ...”

“... driven to discover the truth of its own condition: its ‘metaphors of agency, mastery, and self-centredness’ are revealed to be just that – metaphors, illusions, self-deceptions. The impulse to the lyrical, and to the integrity and authority of the self, survives only in the ...”

“... and other maritime folklore which attached to his theme. He certainly indulged from the start in a self-conscious connoisseurship of the whole experience, with a penchant for collecting mementoes. By most standards, however, Dudley told the facts ‘plainly’ and neither his German rescuers nor the people at Falmouth seem to have reacted with special ...”

“... the ministers used about the King. Asquith is supine, silent, complacent, immobile, dilatory and self-indulgent. Churchill is insensitive, tactless, wilful and impossible. Bonar Law is unamiable, curt, dour, abrasive and disrespectful. Lloyd George is nonchalant, graceless and spiteful. Fisher is venomous, Baldwin is slothful, Balfour is irresolute. And the ...”

“... of the kind he describes will now be taking place without him. As a foreigner, Plante claims in self-defence, he is unable to grasp the distinctions the English make between public and private life – which sounds convenient but could, I suppose, be true. No one who records everything he sees his friends do and hears them say does so without malice, yet ...”

“... effort of the central books of Trilling’s career, The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955) and Beyond Culture (1965): the attempt to create a culture, often to conjure one into being simply by asserting that it exists. He has several strategies to this end, and the major one is to deploy his literary and critical authority. Every ...”

“... Catholic shadow falling over so much of his beliefs. Most ironic of all is when Mr Freeman’s self-emasculation from the historical and the Irish dimensions leads him to scold Edmund Burke for failing to understand the Irish Catholic question. As examples go of scholarly wisdom after the fact, it is a fine entry, comparable to the economic historians who ...”

“... and his worldly occupation: the former was to be manifest in the latter. It was through rigorous self-analysis and constant application to duty that the elect ascertained his election, and since to doubt election was to demonstrate that one belonged to the reprobate, such analysis and application were the necessary seals of salvation. Scottish theology, as ...”

“... melodrama and attention, and in pretentious claims for her creativeness, punctuated by lapses into self-loathing. Patrick White himself is at different times described by Alex as ‘the old sod’, someone ‘you can rely on’, someone she ‘can get round’, ‘a performer’, ‘looking his primmest’, ‘leaning on his stick, the born Mother ...”

“... Such a suggestion is of necessity pure speculation, and indeed it may well be wrong, but it is not self-evidently absurd. Nor does Richard Cromwell, as he appears in this book, look as convincing an architect of his own downfall as the ‘Tumble-down Dick’ on whom we were brought up. He fought back vigorously against his opponents, and, like Charles in ...”

“... distaste for, the grotesque American art world. Simonds is rebuked for inflicting on us his ‘self-invented and self-aggrandising ordeals’ in the slime, but elsewhere Schnabel is commended for his ‘display of energy and ambition’, his ‘lack of inhibition and decorum’, his ‘boisterous’ swagger. There are no ...”

“... with the expulsion of the Soviets. The Great Leap Forward, which followed, was a demonstration of self-reliance. The period of the Great Leap is described with authority and a wealth of detail in the middle volume of Roderick MacFarquhar’s formidable Origins of the Cultural Revolution. It was a failure which left the country in a state of near-chaos. The ...”

“... essays, tell us about Sidgwick’s marginal comments.) In it we find that Russell is adopting ‘self-realisation’ as the standard. But this is still a morality in which we postulate some broadly-defined end and make everything else a means to it. And this style of moral reasoning he retained all his life: Granny’s worry that the relevant calculations ...”