“... a life-story with a distinctly Shandian turn, but one that is also a serious inward quest and self-examination. These different departments are juxtaposed or merged with dazzling fluency – the verve, the apparently spontaneous resourcefulness of the tale are amazing – and up to a point the fact that all this throws up ambiguities and puzzles for the ...”

“... Prize.The cycle of protest that started in Britain in late 2010 was unusually contentious, and self-consciously part of this global wave. It included student demonstrations against rises in tuition fees, mass marches against austerity accompanied by occupations of tax-dodging shops, and a homegrown version of Occupy Wall Street on the steps of St ...”

“... makes clearer the socialist politics Adorno preferred to obscure for reasons of comfort and self-preservation: it’s clear why they didn’t want it published.Adorno never fully committed to the West in the Cold War – whereas Horkheimer supported the war in Vietnam on ‘yellow peril’ grounds – but he knew on which side his bread was buttered. He ...”

“... debt repayment schedule on the condition that Varoufakis (whom they considered untrustworthy and self-interested) wasn’t in the room. He resigned, and Syriza and its leader, Alexis Tsipras, clung on to power by cleaving ever more closely to macroeconomic orthodoxy, expunging any element of populism along the way.Politics in the late 2010s was fertile ...”

“... from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true: but the writer who is out-of-country, even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of ...”

“... for crime. His schemes attracted a wide following, particularly among industrial workers and self-taught intellectuals of the lower middle class. The Owenite socialist movement in the 1830s and 1840s constituted what was probably the most extensive radical counter-culture that had existed in England since the time of the Civil War. Yet few historians ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the fabric of our everyday lives, however. Jennifer Terry has a gift in the popular columnist and self-described ‘motherless’ man Philip Wylie, who coined the term ‘momism’ to describe the American mother’s dominating influence over her children, particularly her sons, and whose bestselling book Generation of Vipers (1942) blamed ‘megaloid ...”

“... the effect has been to convert a small cadre of soldiers and a few bands of villagers armed for self-defence into the beginnings of a national uprising – a good parallel is Ireland in 1916. When I was here in March friends were still telling me they thought the KLA might be a Serbian security force provocation, invented to justify repression. When I came ...”

“... in the letters and his ‘scientific’ papers, heterosexuality is, among other things, a form of self-hatred; after all, what is so distasteful about one’s own sex that one has, so exclusively, to desire the opposite one? The interesting link that psychoanalysis had constructed between paranoia and homosexuality revealed something even more disquieting ...”

“... person in the United Kingdom.’ His resentment was both intensified and balanced by a remarkable self-confidence, and MacDonagh is particularly good at showing how the various elements in this complex psychology were rooted in his Kerry background and shaped by his education in France, London and Dublin. All of this made him at the same time a social ...”

“... now lives in areas that are more than 90 per cent Protestant or 95 per cent Catholic.’ Ethnic self-cleansing: a war to unite the Irish nation has generated this cantonal reality of physical separation. The maintenance of central authority prevented large-scale ‘massacres and population movements’ like those of Bosnia, but could not stop a capillary ...”

“... claim on its inside cover. It’s not the fraudulence of this that strikes the eye so much as the self-pity. The bosses of the new conservatism go about the place talking (but by no means looking) like the members of some dissident and persecuted underground. All you have to do, in order to sympathise with these neo-zealots, is pretend to yourself that the ...”

“... such as the old-fashioned idea of full disclosure – has been permitted to challenge the self-interested ghouls who pay out their ration of ‘secrets’ in a niggardly and mysterious fashion as a form of individual and collective welfare. What if, I decided, what if, just for once, one read this output as if history mattered and as if the war of ...”