“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... only in so far as it embodied a religious idea which anonymous artists, renouncing any notion of self-expression or reputation, brought to their work through the practice of yoga. The Buddhist stupa or Hindu temple image, then, was designed to recreate for the spectator the same visionary connection with his subject that the artist had experienced through ...”

“... you and I already drinking brandy and everyone else is still drinking wine?’ ‘Terry,’ the self-described Delta dirt farmer replies, ‘there was a saying in currency in the court of the Emperor Napoleon at the beginning of the last century: “Claret is for the ladies, and port for men but brandy is for the heroes.” ’ Morris’s account of his ...”

“... real and fallible ones such as the UN and the League of Nations. In 1900, however, humanity’s self-destructive tendencies were symbolised by the conflict between the British imperial military machine and the rebellious farmers of the Transvaal. The Boer War had started with the usual catalogue of military disasters, which to Wells (and many ...”

“... for Renamo (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), the anti-government insurgency. ‘The brisk self-assurance of that piece now makes me wince,’ he says in the preface to his careful and informative book. ‘Like many foreign observers, I saw Mozambique through a South African lens, expecting to understand the country – and the war which devours it ...”

“... into parking lots, Malls, outlets, chains, et cetera. This is our hero, Erisychthon; Ex-boxer, self-styled entrepreneur, ex-con (Wire fraud, two years in a white-collar ‘Country Club’) after which The town received him back With open arms. Why not? He’d made them rich, Some of them anyway, besides He had a certain big man’s swagger People admire; a ...”

“... was that there were too many good solutions and the Government, being its usual inefficient self, couldn’t make up its mind which one it liked best. Glancing over his shoulder, the executive leaned towards me across the table and confided, man to man: ‘It’s like you’ve got a blonde, a brunette and a redhead, real glamorous gals, all lined up and ...”

“... writing seems misty-eyed to the point of simple-mindedness – with LPs reduced to the level of self-help manuals – but DeCurtis is doing no more than articulate the conservatism that lies at the heart of both rock criticism and the music industry. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” and it’s not what they wanted after all. The idea that pop music was ...”

“... was prepared to think in terms less of reproach than of damage limitation. But British plans (and self-defeating British secrecy) dictated, first, that scarcely anything should start before the ultimatum expired, and secondly, that no airborne invasion from Cyprus be attempted before the seaborne reinforcements had arrived from Malta. The allies thus ...”

“... human being in most social circumstances would want: they include money and ‘the means to self-respect’. Sen’s own proposal is that the space in which the most basic equality is to be established is that of freedom itself. Rawls’s primary goods, he claims, represent means rather than ends: the only point of money as a primary good is its power ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... goes off on its own, creating its own object, a picture of itself rather than a prophecy. The bold self-portrait on the cover of Julian Symons’s excellent selection from Lewis’s work in a sense tells us all we need to know about his manner, which is a kind of distillation of Art Déco – fierce, highly-coloured, angular, ugly, but with a grotesque tactile ...”

“... or, if so, where the ashes had been put. Her letters are beguiling, but quite often apologetic and self-accusing. Her strange spelling (perhaps dyslexia) grew no better. On the honey labels which she designed for David Garnett at Charleston, even ‘Charleston’ is spelled wrong. This was in spite of her great capacity for enjoyment and her strong physical ...”

“... on trial in the current academic debates: this and the belief in the consistency of identity, the self as a seamless web. Already the richly humanistic efforts of Geoffrey Hartman, Pierre Bourdieu and Christopher Norris are rescuing the work of Heidegger and de Man without endangering the principle that ideology and text are invariably (if ...”