“... life in general, one which smacks of the patrician rather than the puritan. Adopting this witty, self-ironising style has been the quickest route for expatriates like Wilde, Wittgenstein, Ernest Gellner, Isaiah Berlin or Tom Stoppard to become English. In doing so, they compensate for their outsider status by becoming honorary aristocrats, superior to the ...”

“... friends, Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and the young Keats were all, like him, mostly self-educated and chronically short of money. Haydon had also come to know Wordsworth, who was in London in December 1817. On the 28th Haydon invited him to dinner to meet Keats. Charles Lamb was there. Hazlitt, who had attacked Wordsworth in print, was not ...”

“... institutions of this kind or even by repatriation and return. They were in the end reflexive, self-referential structures, and would be undermined by dispossession, struggle and unending loss. Like a Conradian hero, Ibrahim seemed always to be trying to rescue meaning and pride from the dramas going on around him, as well as from his own ...”

“... as a leering parasite. The reviewers agreed on three things. Maschler had written an absurdly self-important memoir. But he was, they reluctantly conceded, a very important publisher. It was not mere hype to label him, as the blurb did (concocted, presumably, by Maschler), ‘the most important publisher in Britain’. Third, it was generally implied, he ...”

“... charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic jam on the M5. In Search of ...”

“... the ideal scientist from the person of Richard Feynman. It was a very public persona: theatrical, self-consciously paradoxical, both naive and faux naive, seemingly spontaneous and confessional but artfully prepared and always reserving something of himself from the public domain. The hand-waving, the shifting from foot to foot, the rapid-fire ...”

“... terms of our dutiful conformity to a universal law. For them, experience in the form of desire or self-interest is usually what gets in the way of doing the right thing. It would be possible to construct something like a grand narrative of experience from the components of Jay’s book, though he is far too sensible to do so himself. The medieval ...”

“... have been removed from circulation. It is not news that all images are subject to both direct and self-imposed political and ideological control. Private Jessica Lynch, who had the independence of mind to resent the falsifications of her captivity narrative for propaganda purposes and the courage to say so, has also quietly disappeared from major-media ...”

“... mean’. Malinowski did not dissent, or doubt that the Trobrianders were much like everyone else. Self-reflection and observation fed off each other, yielding not only aversion and self-disgust but also new insights. ‘What is the deepest essence of my investigations? To discover what are [the native’s] main ...”

“... and inescapable – youdunnit. Invoking polycausality in writing about murder may be a cultural self-defence mechanism, which we may have inherited via a number of crooked byways from ancient Greece: by imbuing murder with large numbers of overlapping motives, and by embedding it in fictions which include the occult and the inexplicable (madness, jealous ...”

“... of which Coward was the theatrical master, worked as a kind of sympathetic magic to dispel both self-hatred and public scorn. ‘Has it ever struck you that flippancy might cover a very real embarrassment?’ someone asks, again in Private Lives. The most gossamer of his good plays, Private Lives is adamant on the subject of ...”

“... of illumination came from the more intimate circle in which the remarks were made. Cosima writes, self-consciously as always when her vision in concerned, that ‘Luther held table conversations, we hold bed conversations.’ One or two outsiders – the conductor and pianist Josef Rubinstein and after 1880 the painter Paul von Joukowsky – are part of the ...”

“... make an explicit comparison of that sort, but the reader senses a similar response: The reliable, self-respecting working man and his wife, who have learnt that if they want justice they must strive for it themselves, not wait for the gentry to give it to them – these are the rock on which the Labour Party was built, and it was these who Clem not only ...”

“... to Pareto (not without reason), concerned less with substantive and procedural justice than with self-protection and placement. ‘If Gladstone had been an Italian,’ he later remarked, ‘he certainly would only have opposed Salisbury for a couple of years. He would then have reached a compromise. England would have been governed by a Gladstone-Salisbury ...”

“... to totalitarianism became the governing intellectual framework for the West in the Cold War. His self-conscious marginality, the cause of enormous struggle during his life, became a posthumous badge of authenticity: it helped reassure countless liberals and leftists that one could oppose the Soviet Union without giving up on the dream of liberation from ...”