“... to take the family’s religion seriously, since it has already been shown to be destructive and self-defeating.In theory Jas’s two grannies represent different intensities of commitment – there’s a more religious and a less religious side to the family – but no such nuance is detectable in the text, unless it’s the presence of a coil stuck in ...”

“... The ‘unconstitution’ has worked only because England’s ruling elites, out of decent self-interest, have never fully exploited its incredible lack of formal constraint on executive power. That convention is now ending, and the executive is pushing hard at its boundaries. What’s needed is not yet a constitution, but its preliminary, the ...”

“... inside sanatoriums varied and Iris left school to care for her mother. Being a daughter was about self-sacrifice (Iris tried to jump into Beatrice’s grave when she was buried near Rose in Bristol), a belief Iris tried to impress on her daughter Hazel, who was born in Devon in 1948. But Carby was unruly. She resisted assimilation into the maternal family ...”

“... of the civil rights movement, as well as to fundamentalist Christians and inheritors of the self-reliant Jefferson-Jackson tradition. His rhetoric warned of the evils of big government: he rallied businesses and banks against regulation, family-minded moralists against permissive laws, and the vestiges of the America First lobby against expensive ...”

“... seem traditional if Clark weren’t such an active protagonist in his own argument. In part this self-staging comes with a phenomenological perspective (Clark counts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s great essay ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ as one inspiration), and it is accentuated by psychoanalysis as well. This isn’t new to Clark – his social art history often ...”

“... prestige of France. When they finally met, de Estrada unwittingly snubbed Napoleon’s progressive self-image by explaining that Mexico needed ‘a dictatorship on the pattern established in France’. But this didn’t prevent the two men from plotting regime change. French forces were to accompany a British naval operation aimed at punishing Juárez for ...”

“... echoed around him throughout his life. But despite all that, Pope still looks like the most self-consciously canonical of 18th-century English poets, even though the canon has been exploded outwards, and even though the number of people who really love reading him is now, I would guess, less than a thousandth of what it was in 1720.He achieved this ...”

“... mature women of vaguely Eastern European origin who used sex to drain men of money, status and self-esteem before discarding them – and then to the more youthful flappers, with their casual disregard for social and moral convention. In 1926 MGM cast the unequivocally European Garbo in two vamp films, Torrent and The Temptress. In both, she sinks her ...”

“... novels, among them a belief in the primacy of the conduct of the individual and the quest for self-knowledge over any group allegiance, a belief in elitism and a suspicion of democracy and equality. In The Mask of Apollo (1966), Axiothea, a girl who disguises herself as a boy to attend Plato’s academy, says: ‘Equality! I hope I need never sink so ...”

“... to let the documents speak. Whereas sociologists tested hypotheses, refined concepts and offered a self-consciously theoretical analysis, historians remained wedded to the instance, accumulating endless examples and finding exceptions to every rule. Knowledge of the sources was the profession’s substitute for thought. For the more outspoken radicals, and the ...”

“... by Jones’s clamorous appeals – Freud is more than willing to remind Jones of his abject self. Jones was certainly preoccupied, in more ways than one, by what to call his potent self: ‘Jones’ seemed singularly unpromising. Given, as Jones writes in one of these letters, that ‘psychoanalysis is ...”

“... that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to self-righteously brazen it out. I want. They were good at wanting, and I shared much more common ground with them than with my mother when I was three or four years old. Also, they measured up to the magical monsters in the story-books. Grandma’s idea of ...”

“... syndrome, composed of circumstances and behaviour. Your idea of real feelings, and of a real self, cannot intelligibly be applied to any but your own case. Use of the same words about ‘others’ is a kind of pun. This is the concept of mind that Wittgenstein was fighting against in the Thirties. Pears shows how the attack on solipsism prefigures the ...”

“... he wants to avoid. I shall focus more on the first of these devices. Heidegger often uses quotes self-consciously to make subtle distinctions. As Derrida makes clear, Heidegger’s own method of deconstructing the history of philosophy involves putting quotes around the traditional philosophemes like ‘spirit’, ‘soul’ and, in general, any term ...”

“... rock stars come to clean up on the South African circuit so long off-limits to them; endless self-appointed ‘monitoring’ teams from black American universities; old South African exiles like the actor Anthony Sher, the ex-clergyman Cosmas Desmond – now the only white man on the PAC list – and Ronald Segal, once editor of the Penguin Africa ...”