“... face I realised I had caught a piece of lost time. Not only Madrid and Dr Barros and an earlier self, but Viridiana as it felt when I first saw it: blasphemous, brilliant, ragged, indifferent to the preoccupations of unity and coherence which most aesthetics demand – Saturn swallowing a daughter.If I had been less devoted to the notion of the death of the ...”

“... Scotland mattered to England. On both sides of the border, monarchs made claims about status and self-sufficiency, drawing on classical iconography, Renaissance architecture, the curbing of magnate power and a consolidation of boundaries. These processes developed in Scotland as a result of James V’s residence in France, his French marriages and ...”

“... movement in the 1970s).Buckley ran rhetorical circles around many of his opponents, exposing the self-satisfactions of the mainstream. But he also performed an inadvertent public service by inviting on his show a considerable number of Black radicals and figures from the American left. A favourite tactic was to skew conversations with ill-fitting historical ...”

“... twisted in anxiety, his head in his hands.’ Benn’s re-education was never as spectacularly self-lacerating as Joseph’s; nevertheless, in so far as the Labour Party has a Joseph, it is Benn: both genuinely well-intentioned, both seekers after truth, both caught in hopelessly inconsistent political and intellectual positions. Paul Foot’s political ...”

“... Nicolas Copernicus’s reform of astronomy delivered a formidable blow to our sense of self in nature. In its effects, Copernicanism probably affected human consciousness more deeply than Darwinism. Published in 1543, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres argued that our earthly globe is not the unique and motionless centre of the great cosmic sphere ...”

“... crude likeness to Shelley, save that his nose is a switchback and his lines blurred ... The usual self-consciousness of young men, especially as he threw in, gratuitously, the information that he descends from Dean, Rector, Bishop, Von Ranke etc etc, only in order to say that he despises them. I tried, perhaps, to curry favour, as my weakness is. L was ...”

“... to listen, is too much. It is the ‘ear’, not our vocabulary, that is at fault. Let us not be self-righteous. Evidence of torture is hard to come by in the countries where it occurs regularly. Anyone interested in finding out how difficult it is, morally and practically, for civilised, well-meaning people to catch up with their own delinquent governments ...”

“... he could not keep it truthfully without some betrayal of his wife. He had not the first loyalty to self of which great diarists are made. He used diaries in the stationer’s sense: to keep track of engagements and weekly expenses. His first, kept for six months in 1880 while working for Edison Telephone, records little but shillings and pence spent in the ...”

“... the essence of Japaneseness. In his case the word iki: ‘one of the most conspicuous forms of self-expression’, he says in Dale’s translation, ‘of the unique existential modes of Eastern culture, nay, rather of the Yamato race itself’. Iki, translated by Dale as ‘chic’, was a term originally used in the demi-monde of pre-modern Japan. It ...”

“... newly-emergent interdiscipline substantially depends is, like his botanical expertise, largely self-acquired. In a string of books written since 1975 he has been steadily cutting his way through the dense growth of misconceptions about the nature of our woodlands, and now in this latest one, The History of the Countryside, he has brought his axe to bear on ...”

“... has said this, it appears perfectly obvious, and one can hardly imagine why it was not always self-evident. The particular handle this affords DeMaria in his overall task is the ordering principle it supplies for his own anatomy. Successive chapters are devoted to themes such as knowledge and ignorance, truth, mind, language, arts and science, and ...”

“... in a kinsman’s book. He is aware of the temptation to be boastful, even when offering apparent self-criticism. When he sits down to tap his memory, a flood of images rolls out: he must select the incidents that are ‘telling’, that fit into the author’s pattern, still being aware that readers may detect a different pattern, quite unintended. There ...”

“... pro-American not pro-European, often but not always Jewish, sometimes but not invariably self-made, anti-élitist, didn’t belong to the Athenaeum, didn’t go to the opera. Ranelagh gives a flavour of some of the higher idiocies that peppered the dialogue of some of these dreamers. Norman Strauss, a former Unilever manager and an early Thatcher ...”

“... requires responsibility, which requires sanity, which is an achievement not a gift. Rational self-rule, individual or social, causes mental fatigue; it’s less effort to be dictated to. What Collingwood does not say, so I will say it for him, is that people do not really like the truth; they feel coerced by reason, bullied by fact. In a certain ...”

“... and are prevented by the country’s constitution from arming for any other purpose than immediate self-defence. But their ease has been increasingly disturbed. The United States has wanted to reduce its trading deficit with Japan. It has also been asking Tokyo to make a larger contribution to the wider defence of North-East Asia. By the early Eighties, the ...”