“... this is a notion that scholars are inclined to dismiss as laxly belletristic or ignominiously self-sparing: by their nature they are drawn towards the ideal of ‘completeness’. ‘It is limitation,’ Goethe said (even Goethe!), ‘that makes the poet, the artist, the man.’ He is also reported as saying that for him the main thing was always to make ...”

“... Hoff’ or, with lewd intent, ‘Thos Off’. He was frightened by the printed word ‘self-abuse’, since the slang expression ‘tossing off’, was so harmless and humorous. ‘Why is is that giving a word to something invariably transforms it, usually into something awful? (“God” provides a most striking case in point.)’ He is a skilful ...”

“... Morton Fullerton, whom she had met through James, strangely led to The Reef of 1912, the self-consciously tragic novel in which she comes closest to late James. Here the involved multi-character social chronicle temporarily gives way to a story of sexual susceptibility and betrayal mostly set in a country house and taking place between four main ...”

“... an interior dialogue breaks out, a dialogue which, on the Bradleian account, engages just the good self and the bad self, and which in Kleinian theory pulls in the more numerous and ethically more ambiguous figures of the inner world.’ And before we quite know what is happening, Bradley’s Ethical Studies are ...”

“... of irreligion Vico was prepared to approach. At the same time, to view Vico as a member – even a self-consciously embattled member – of the République des Lettres carries no automatic implication of hostility to the Enlightenment. Several of the ideas he developed in his attempt to rebut the sceptical account of natural man as merely ...”

“... provocation and Arab aggression; and that its military reprisals were legitimately undertaken in self-defence. The evidence gleaned by Morris from Israeli, British, American and UN archives – Arab governments do not, as a rule, open their archives to research – suggests that infiltration into Israel was a direct consequence of the displacement and ...”

“... The architects submitted plans but, after a burst of sectoral lobbying and horse-trading among self-important Western governments, not one agency headquarters was built next to the UN. Today, they are scattered in nine cities in seven countries across two continents and one (the Atlantic) ocean – which is like a country locating all its ministries ...”

“... and its unique freshness. Wilson, it should be said, is always making judgments: scepticism and self-irony are not part of his repertoire. He did write poems, plays and novels, but they have always seemed to me neither as interesting nor as satisfying as his essays and historical studies. His own imagination simply does not soar, nor his insight pierce ...”

“... 16th century was an age of how to,’ Eamon tells us. Books of secrets, a mixture of self-help manuals and learned philosophical treatises, combined advice on how to harden steel with goat’s blood and how to tenderise beef with fig stalks, methods for seeing faraway objects by combining curved glasses and for preventing lightning strikes by ...”

“... openly with several lovers before marrying Godwin – by having her heroine reject the erotic self-denial enforced on women in patriarchal society. Not only does she show Sibella, innocent child of the forest, freely ‘giving’ herself to the worldly Clement, she has her defend the union – which will result in pregnancy and her death in childbirth ...”

“... a different world: their lamps have very definitely been lit. Unlike her, they are ‘not at all self-conscious in their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair’. At once envious of and terrified by their success, Joan has to acknowledge that she belongs to another age: her place in the evolution of feminism is that of the ‘pioneer’ who ...”

“... from the output targets of central planning as well as from the more familiar imperatives of self-interest. In principle, the problem can be solved by privatisation. The trick is to give the person who makes decisions about the use of a resource (a piece of land, for example) property rights in that resource, so that he knows his own economic interests ...”

“... army of the good’. A moon-faced vicar or two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake ...”

“... Khasbulatov must be taken seriously, though it isn’t always easy to do so: he can be so self-regarding and flatulent, so biased in his handling of the Russian Parliament, of which he is the Speaker, and so contradictory in everything he says. But he has become one of the most important men in Russia; and because of the state of that country, and the ...”

“... precious to uncork. McGann turns the tables on the common judgment that Morris’s books were too self-conscious to be readable (‘beautiful but dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti stone’ in the punning words of Robert Carlton Brown, a maker of what on the evidence of McGann’s examples must be handmade books of exemplary ...”