“... brutally suppress any sign of resistance, then scuttle before you’ve properly prepared it for self-government – and expect everything to turn out OK. That’s with the best will in the world; of which there was some, but not enough, in the British Empire. It probably hasn’t ever happened in history. It certainly didn’t happen in Zimbabwe, where ...”

“... gravity from the sense of “privilege” to that of “security”’, leaving the ‘immunitary self-preservation of life’ as the central issue for subsequent political theory and praxis. For Esposito, this is the origin of modern biopolitics, in which individuals are for the first time truly singular, ‘surrounded by a boundary that simultaneously ...”

“... your speeches, Dick Nixon?’ jeered Charlene, a tall, leggy, mussed-blonde deserter groupie and self-described Missouri trailer trash. Charlene, fed up with ‘American fascist bullshit’, had landed on us one day along with a tubercular deserter from Stockholm’s snowdrifts, Stanislau (‘Stash’), the son of Polish immigrants who ran a bakery in ...”

“... referred to themselves as the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets. The work of this group was always wrapped in self-justifying, crudely fashioned, post-structuralist commentary, and emphasised indeterminism, resistance to figuration, narrative, subject-matter, verbal music, imagery or any pleasure that might be associated with poetry, pleasure which they believed pandered ...”

“... been recognised, is how I felt.’ There is recognition also, as well as perhaps some latent self-congratulation, in Homer’s admiration of the hippies: ‘living as they did, these kids were more radical critics of society than the antiwar or civil rights people getting so much attention in the newspapers … They had simply rejected the entire ...”

“... in Pennsylvania. She once told me in exasperation: “Husbands are not important!”’ Guest’s self-effacing pursuit of capital-I Imagination, after the models of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens and H.D., would cause her to be left behind as the age moved towards a model of political and feminist poetries. But her 500-page Collected Poems belongs ...”

“... Places. But few people reckoned with Ransome’s remarkable energy and ingenuity where his own self-preservation was concerned. He could charm his way out of any tight corner. He also reminds me at times of P.G. Wodehouse’s antihero, Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, with his pince-nez made of ginger-beer wire, his untidy clothes and his utter lack of ...”

“... with his audience. His moral lessons seem designed to catch out the inattentive or the self-contented just when they think they have worked out how things stand. The fables seem homely, and their morals easy to find (don’t forget to be nice to mice, even if you’re a lion); but repeatedly the moralitas snaps into a different register in order to ...”

“... National Socialism. Broadening the argument, Enzensberger suggested that at a certain point ritual self-abasement becomes its opposite: qui s’accuse, s’excuse. The second essay is a long piece on the World Bank and the IMF published in 1988. It is beautifully constructed, and filled with the evidence of thorough research, as well as interviews and ...”

“... be appointed a squad leader can push you around any way he wants,’ he warns. The army depends on self-deception: A sentence comes to me, that I read once, written by some general: ‘The soldier must die with dignity.’ It must have seemed pretty simple to the general at his desk. A bullet hits you in the chest, you raise your arms, shout, ‘It is good to ...”

“... comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office. It was a view shared by much of the New Labour administration. The law is the servant, they believed, of our duly elected political masters. It is what ...”

“... of the mind in terms of what is given in experience, and the latter (Leibniz) insisting on the self-propelled power of thought. Which side of the divide one places oneself on is partly a matter of intellectual temperament; but Skinnerian behaviourism and Darwinism are still scientific theories, answerable to empirical evidence. The partial similarity in ...”

“... very occasional use of the phrase ‘invisible hand’ – the now well-worn metaphor for the self-regulating capacity of the free market – was playful rather than integral to his message. The co-architect of New Labour, Gordon Brown, went a few steps further, attempting to rehabilitate Smith, not without some plausibility, as a proponent of ‘the ...”

“... by arsenic was fairly rare. Most people, understandably, chose opium. Only about 10 per cent of self-poisoners ate arsenic, although according to one toxicologist it may have been ‘a national peculiarity’ that a much larger proportion of Americans used arsenic as a means of suicide. Perhaps fewer of them had read Madame Bovary and so didn’t know about ...”

“... in what they say. Old Corruption wasn’t as dysfunctional as it should have been. It was largely self-correcting, and was offensive not because it didn’t work but because it did. Macaulay was right when he claimed that the distribution of parliamentary seats and electors demonstrated ‘a disproportion between society and its institutions’. Decayed ...”