“... the Kent coast – Thanet Earth is a virtuous producer.Thirty Thanet Earths could bring Britain to self-sufficiency in ‘salad’, but even if you regard that as a triumph, there are snags. For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For ...”

“... available, prove him to be uncommonly astute about Vivienne’s plight but also surprisingly self-doubting. As for his correspondence with Vivienne herself, he is believed to have destroyed all but a few of her letters while the affair was going on; and very few of his letters to her have been found or made available – there are no ...”

“... brick like Being and Nothingness by 1943. Sartre and the Freudo-Marxist philosophers of the self were, like novelists, discursive thinkers, who needed the long process and materiality of writing in order to discover their own thoughts. Canguilhem’s observation that there was no existentialist equivalent of Cavaillès may be true, but if there had been ...”

“... at home, and even before the delegates at Kyoto sat down to the cheerful welcoming banquet, self-interest was noticeably darkening the doorway. Conventions are good business anywhere. As Japan’s leading tourist destination, Kyoto has ample accommodation and no heavy industry, but there were deeper reasons for the choice of venue. Japan loves the ...”

“... of his flak jacket as he rocks to and fro in the cold – he discusses the war in the tones of a self-consciously patriotic veteran, laconic, fatalistic, deadpan.His ostensible message is an appeal to Volodymyr Zelensky to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut to prevent further bloodshed. The city, he claims, is almost surrounded. The impact of this small claim ...”

“... a tie. Ackland’s memoir, For Sylvia, which tells some of this past, is absorbing, and stunningly self-absorbed. It deals in blights, anaemias, religious guilts and bad period pains; it is strewn with expressions of love for Sylvia Townsend Warner, and it is strewn with expressions of anxiety which hover between the frank and the fanciful. The most persistent ...”

“... quite sure. Bate does have two searching pages on the padlock: but the ‘facts’ are by no means self-evident in their nature or in their bearing. Bate says that only Mrs Thrale’s ‘half-playful’ remark about sparing the rod supplies sexual innuendo: Johnson’s own letter, in French, he sees as positively innocent in its ‘infantilism’. There are ...”

“... whose indebtedness to other literary works has nothing to do with derivativeness – nor with a self-regarding pan-literariness. Rather, Banville reminds us of the ways in which, and of the extent to which, literature can legitimately be made out of the issue of its own mode and being – and can thereby address profound issues of human cognition and ...”

“... married another lady of entirely chaste demeanour, with whom and with which he lived in placid self-satisfaction ever afterwards, although they had rather a tiresome time during the German invasion of 1940 and had to retire (for good, as it turned out) to Rhodesia. And oh yes, I almost forgot: for some part of every featureless day Mercer withdrew to his ...”

“... look so many times I’d forgotten what it was. The whole thing looked like an instrument of self-torture with a handle and a zip. I made my entrance and everyone wanted to know where I was off to looking like that. My brother did a comb mime with his knife, tongue hanging out, jacket pushed back like a Ted. My father made me go upstairs and start ...”

“... of modern sensibility, lie at the heart of Heidegger’s doctrine of being. The festive ‘self-opening’ of man’s spirit to the radiant pressures of existence, to the neighbourhood of agencies more ancient and powerful than himself, a neighbourhood peculiarly graphic in high art and literature, is implicit in the Heideggerian term which Carne-Ross ...”

“... works merit insertion: Spedding’s Bacon, for example, and perhaps Masson’s Milton. The self-denying ordinance which has led to the inclusion of so few primary sources could be breached more frequently. The section on political thought (where Machiavelli is repeatedly accorded a curious, almost Scottish spelling) could be stiffened. I ...”

“... contaminating him. I have seen three or four black-toned juvenilia which were perhaps the kind of self-betrayal that inspired his reserve. I understand the decision to suppress them, because it would be a pity if anything were to weaken the lifelong testimony to lucid outwardness and to the otherness of the actual, the beauty in which he placed his faith. We ...”

“... record as a practical revolutionary was pathetic: trust in quite the wrong people, and hopeless, self-indulgent incompetence about details large and small. His prose was lazy and pretentious: ‘Psychology, statistics and the entire course of history show that ...’ It was not altogether accidental that Bakunin’s appeal went down best in Italy, where the ...”

“... to see what all the fuss was about, whether it was something they could be part of sans affront to self-esteem. And those temple hyenas who had seen enough, nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze, were no place you could count on having taken a proverbial powder as rifle butts received another notch. I, meanwhile ... I was going to say I had squandered ...”