“... an excuse for indulgence, but it would be hard to find anyone who thinks that this sort of self-justification is rational behaviour. Something similar applies to procrastination. You can always tell yourself that it doesn’t matter if you put off a piece of work until tomorrow, but do you really think that this is a rational way to carry on, given the ...”

“... LaMonte Young, was the band’s violist and played bass guitar. Maureen ‘Mo’ Tucker, a self-taught teenage percussionist, played standing up, without cymbals or pedals, and was one of only a very few female drummers in rock. Sterling Morrison, the band’s fine second guitarist, has always been underappreciated, partly because he maintained he was ...”

“... province with a group of idealistic students who wanted to combine a life of manual labour with self-directed study. In 1972, he moved with them to a factory and spent ten years there, working through the day and reading at night, before eventually resuming his formal education in 1982, just as Deng Xiaoping began to marketise large sections of China’s ...”

“... being moved. My own leg, in this moment, was no longer my own, and no longer part of my body or my self. No longer part of anything – unreal, absurd. (‘That which is not Body is no part of the Universe,’ writes Hobbes, ‘and since the Universe is All, it is Nothing and Nowhere.’) Suddenly, then, my leg (my ex-leg) was Nothing and Nowhere: it was ...”

“... nowadays I’m not sure that ‘the pictures’, like ‘the wireless’, aren’t among the self-consciously adopted emblems of fogeydom, the verbal equivalent of those smart Covent Garden establishments that do a line in old luggage. But calling the pictures ‘the movies’ went with calling cigarettes ‘fags’, beer ‘booze’ or girls ...”

“... 11 July 1982), writes: ‘Our case rests on the facts, on prescription and on the principle of self-determination.’ It is not clear what facts are meant. On prescription, the Sunday Times says that title from ‘continuous peaceful occupation’ became ‘an accepted principle in international law in the Thirties’. Professor Rosalyn Higgins argues from ...”

“... a fair-minded referee of their battles with Labour’s centrists. His story begins with Benn’s self-reinvention as a tribune of the people in the wake of 1968. Benn’s foundational insight was that ‘more people want to do more for themselves, and believe they are capable of doing so, if the conditions could only be created that would make this ...”

“... series and the pastoral tradition, as well as to the mixture of dramatic speaking and self-revelation that sonnets often exhibit. In the following decades, once Frost had developed his theories about the desirability of poetry’s proximity to ordinary speech, he tended to claim that his influences came from life rather than literature. ‘I want ...”

“... English. I’ve thrown in my lot with England. It’s the best country in the world.’ Such loyal self-deprecation is scarcely less suspect. The Crooked Timber of Humanity is more an elegant restatement than a substantial addition to his characteristic themes. Three quarters of the book consists of essays from the same fund of texts out of which the four ...”

“... painful ambivalence, at others with unqualified enthusiasm, but nearly always as the only means of self-determination at their disposal. In The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, published in 1992, Davidson spoke of the ‘spiny contradictions’ beneath the rhetoric of nationalism: ‘If nationalism has been and can be a ...”

“... be summarised as follows. Une Saison en Enfer was composed in 1873. The mode is valedictory, and self-punishing, but it is not the final work – Rimbaud continued to compose his Illuminations, which had begun as a handful of prose-poems some time in 1872, either in Charleville or during his first stint in London with Verlaine. Meanwhile, in ‘Mauvais ...”

“... declares at the beginning of his memoir, has been ‘a rich, multifaceted and unique story’. Self-flattery is characteristically Lanzmannian, but its truth in this case can hardly be denied. He has lived on a grand scale. A teenage fighter in the Resistance, he became Sartre’s protégé in the early 1950s as an editor at Les Temps modernes. He also ...”

“... his wounds and pains,’ Jackson suggests, ‘led him to a place of brittle irony with others, and self-pity with himself.’ The incident further chipped away at the fragile foundations of his parents’ marriage. Estelle, the ‘rebellious dissenter’, wanted to sue the hotel, but Joseph persuaded Chester to sign away his claim, since doing so entitled him ...”

“... of homosexuality in schools, it’s family relations that stand in the way of the sexual self-understanding of young people. What are the odds of someone like Mungo being able to overcome his negative programming if he waits another half-decade? The laws that masquerade as his protectors would rather see him mangled than whole.The Glasgow of Young ...”

“... religion and its shadowy aftermath. The poem seemed to have a lovely assuredness and finality. The self-deprecating voice – resigned and a bit sad – was having an argument with no one. The tone was mild and tolerant, and although it was filled with uncertainty, there was a convincing veneer of pure certainty about the main matter, which is that churches ...”