“... 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 ...”

“... a grim smile and a daunting accuracy, she flashes her torch down into those unlit places of the self where we rearm for our intimate wars with one another. She had chosen to occupy once and for all the territory most favourable to her ambitions both as a novelist and as a moralist. In Tropisms she invented her own form of Social Darwinism, by using ...”

“... two-thirds of whom, according to an opinion poll carried out a year ago, now want some form of self-administration. According to the same poll, barely II per cent of Kurds actually want to secede from Turkey. Even the PKK has explicitly abandoned its earlier talk of separation. Yet the state is adamant in viewing any expression of Kurdishness as incipient ...”

“... version of Henryson. There is a strangeness about some of these poems that recalls the self-consciousness of Hogg’s best fiction; for example when he interrupts himself, as he does in two different poems, to discuss the meaning and success of his own extended similes, or where his medieval dialect suddenly acknowledges its fakery by referring to ...”

“... circle, was marvellously translated into aplomb. Unfortunately, Craft appears to dislike the self that mastered awkward situations as much as the self that originally endured them. The personal strand of the book is indeed preoccupied with self-loathing. June 1966 – Craft is ...”

“... the matter perceptively and succinctly, raises an intriguing point when he asks: ‘Does this self-conferred nobility, Comte de Lautréamont, purposely link the writer with the Marquis de Sade and Lord Byron in an aristocratic élite of the intellect?’ We shall probably never know. If I find the question irritating, it is because Ducasse has come to be ...”

“... world were contrived just for that: to enable peoples to become themselves more fully and self-consciously. Anglo-Britain, however, required a more distinctive, tailor-made garment. Neither ethnicity nor Tom Paine’s republican, civic-territorial nation could have stabilised the vital bond between the English masses and all their alien or ...”

“... 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 ...”