“... reaching the threshold of parenthood, and negotiating the ordeal of young adulthood with its self-deceptions and illusory freedoms, is not an innocent one in Atwood’s earlier novels: on the contrary, it seems to release the underlying Puritan strain in her imagination. The Edible Woman is the story of two flatmates, one of whom escapes at the last ...”

“... which finds the Greenham Women a useful propaganda tool, in a small way – and of course the self-publicists and media operators’; that telephone-tapping is essentially harmless unless used against tax-evaders (‘some of the worst Gestapo-type searches at dawn have involved small businesses’); that the aims of the peace movement are ‘objectively ...”

“... ends. Anonymity ensured that the reviewer for his part subordinated personality to the collective self of the journal. There was no attempt to provide a complete view of the books of the day: what makes the quarterlies historically momentous is their automatic assumption that reviewing books was a central participation in social affairs. A review was the ...”

“... Anglo-Norman cuisine diverged from its French counterpart. Moreover – and this underlies a self-imposed limitation in the scope of All Manners of Food – neither French nor English cookery (let alone Italian or Spanish) can be properly understood without taking into account the extra-European influences upon which all relied in different degrees. As ...”

“... dilemma explains why Foucault finally turned to the history of the various forms assumed by the ‘self’ over the course of Western history. When Foucault takes up the old theme of the antithesis between the ancient morality of personal happiness and the Christian morality of obedience to divine law, he does so in order to address the issue of the morality ...”

“... to the contrary is simply wrong. The point isn’t argued; the rival view is simply treated as self-evidently absurd and repellent in itself and in its consequences, one of which is the practice of treating the Bible as a ‘separate cognitive zone’. That it was so treated for centuries is dismissed as an error one should no longer endorse. Barr remarks ...”

“... you used to cook food or treat frost-bite. The tablets themselves represent another tribute to self-sufficiency. Writing on wood was common enough in the Greco-Roman world. Normally, to judge from the survivals and from the comments of their literary users, the flat surface of the tablet held a shallow central depression, which was filled with wax. Such ...”

“... to die without knowing it – for example, in sleep. The second phase is that of the Death of the Self. The individual begins to conceive of his death as personal, and as preceding an intimate accounting with God. Elaborate wills, giving among other things detailed instructions for the disposal of the body, for masses, tombs and epitaphs, accompanied a new ...”

“... it could be marginally cheaper than other forms of energy, but that it could be made effectively self-renewing and effectively harmless to man, beast or plant. None of the proposed self-renewing alternatives – solar, geothermal, winds, waves, tides, ocean thermal gradients, satellite collectors etc – comes anywhere ...”

“... by no means an unknown figure. His pre-Revolutionary career is generally known through his own self-justifying memoirs, written not long before his execution. The archives of the STN, together with the Paris police records, tell a different story. They show us not so much the pure and persecuted apostle of Enlightenment as a man deeply engaged in the shady ...”

“... meanly, Peters leaves both competitors out of her ‘Select Bibliography’.) All three are, self-confessedly, dwarfed by the late Gordon Ray’s authoritative two-volume biography, Thackeray, The Uses of Adversity (1955) and Thackeray, The Age of Wisdom (1958). Not to labour the point, the story of Thackeray’s life (one of the great Victorian closed ...”

“... he realised it. He had isolated an intrinsic quality of painting and revealed that it could be self-sufficient, an independent imaginative function. The argument at its crudest is about Turner with or without titles: do the subjects matter? Accept him as a Romantic, and say that they do, and the limpid oil studies of the Thames, the evocations of Venice ...”

“... eloquence is stunning. Her biographer detects in the most famous of these letters an element of self-dramatisation: written to lift the spirits of less resolute comrades, they ‘created and perpetuated a myth’. The ‘real’ Rosa Luxemburg, according to Ettinger, was the one who wrote to Leo Jogiches advising him about refurbishing his wardrobe ...”

“... with William Huntington, S.S. The ‘S.S.’ stood for Sinner Saved, and Huntington was a large, self-appointed noise, evangelising throughout the 1790s from his chapel in Great Titchfield Street. There came from his pen a torrent of pamphlets, sermons, admonitions and expostulations of a loud and windy nature. The wind blew from an antinomian quarter ...”

“... images variations on one another? Others are moral. For example, are the drawings of crouching, self-absorbed women voyeuristic intrusions or celebrations of privacy? And some questions, which now turn out to have straightforward answers, arise from conflicting accounts of how Degas lived his last decades. The answers to these, according to ...”