“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... less of a stabilising force than they seem. Deadpan yet tongue in cheek, they constantly slip into self-mockery and teasing. ‘Some of my most classic cases,’ Holmes says, ‘have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley ...”

“... objective, abstract and rational, showing instead that the school began with a gothic, mystical self-image. The first logo, the winning entry in a student competition, was a mishmash of Eastern and occult symbols. Early pieces made in the workshops – bulbous earthenware pitchers by Otto Lindig, wooden reliefs by Joost Schmidt and stained glass by Josef ...”

“... Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention.* His vagabond life with a bohemian intellectual mother, and the charismatic and reckless father who went back to Africa, belong to an early childhood that the Maraniss book recalls in detail and others have explored too, but those years explain ...”

“... go to Versailles, where the peace conference was taking place, and argue the case for Vietnamese self-rule. One of Woodrow Wilson’s aides met him briefly, but self-determination was a privilege restricted to Europeans (though not Germans). He looks awkward in the photograph taken at Versailles, a sleek, well-dressed ...”

“... to be a Finn called Sampo Karjalainen, and is sent to Finland to try to recover his former self. The weather is freezing and the grammar confounding. The novel is an amalgam of conversations half understood, relationships thwarted and lonely bus journeys. But it also gives a glimpse of what seems to have been a much happier experience of ...”

“... point keeps recurring, a time when, as Dorothy is told, we ceased to take things for granted and self-interest and self-servingness took over. Some of this alteration in public life can be put down to the pushing back of the boundaries of the state as begun under Mrs Thatcher and pursued even more disastrously ...”