“... healthy contempt for birth and breeding. Leavis was thus already a fine, intuitive polemicist and self-advertiser, who hardly needed much help from acolytes like Ford. The aggression built into the master’s manner, with its churlish tone calculated to knock the politeness out of polite letters, had a more direct and heady appeal to the young than a Guide to ...”

“... When I was 16, I went to help another troop-leader with a difficult troop. Two nasty, self-righteous little boys brought a prisoner to him. ‘Here, Arfur. ’E swore!’ they said virtuously. Arfur responded: ‘Ow, pour some water dahn the bugger’s arm.’ That took the wind out of the little prigs’ sails. Even swear-words can be cleanly ...”

“... because these institutions, too, were poverty-stricken. Higher up in society many afflictions were self-imposed. It may be said that in old Europe, as in India today, everyone ate either far too much or far too little; doctors were concerned chiefly with the well-off, the over-eaters, so an unshakable faith in purging and bleeding had some ...”

“... professionalism in which they conceal themselves behind thickets of technicality and an equally self-indulgent form of popularisation in which the proportion of rhetoric to argument is unduly high. It is, then, something of an event when a book appears in which the central task which laymen demand of the philosopher – that of providing a clear and ...”

“... is acceptable and what is agreeable (Healey probably lost the leadership on that distinction). Self-styled men of the centre do not always tolerate associated viewpoints – sometimes the very contrary: they claim that they themselves represent the consensus of public opinion, so that they have the People as well as Reason on their side, and that all ...”

“... of which the axioms were known, not through experiments, but through intuition, revelation and self-evidence. This kind of pure scientist felt one-up on a man who dissected dead animals – a snobbism which has lasted more than 300 years. He quotes Thomas Pratt, one of the founders of the Royal Society, writing in 1667: ‘The first thing that ought to be ...”

“... an object, reaches an emotional state in which the exclusive object of her psychic energy is the self’. There is something (more obvious than the words suggest) in that. In the world in which Jean Rhys grew up women were expected first to be pretty, then to flirt and finally to marry. But Mr Kennaway didn’t think she was pretty, Mr Gregg didn’t like ...”

“... themselves and each other, and what happens when events force them ‘to the point where those self-preserving misunderstandings crumble’. From the beginning, when Brabantio before the Venetian Senate reaches out for witchcraft and sorcery to explain his daughter’s elopement, rather than face the fact that she now cares for someone else more than for ...”

“... the order and decorum of its past – puritanical lies, especially, about a former absence of self-indulgent sexual behaviour. Both books report a high incidence of drunkenness and casual violence among the poor, with Britain worse than America, and those who were shocked by the Swinging London of the 1960s and 70s might benefit from reading about the ...”

“... and it is hard to see what Unionists could have done except resist Home Rule, not merely from self-interest, but from a purist belief that Home Rule was a corrupt bargain extracted from an already decadent imperial power. There are comparisons to be made here with the Boers in the 1890s and the public posture of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front. No wonder ...”

“... All the quirks and feats of learning, the vaulting ambition of thought, the imperiousness of self-assertion, are grist to Carey’s mill. But the mill produces flour which is actually ground-up millstone. To ask for bread is then assuredly to be given a stone. The poetry is admired for being callous, brutal and pitiless. For Carey hates the thought of ...”

“... incapable of acting except foolishly, except when the occasion doesn’t require it, because he is self-bewilderingly odd. There is a character who claims to have no father, only a grandfather, and when that is called an odd omission, cannot see why: he is a type of all Gerhardie’s sympathetic characters, and nearly all of them are sympathetic. The ...”

“... its successive leaders drawn from the same class of British society, with its capacity to disguise self-interest behind proposals for social reform, to salve its social conscience by promoting good causes at other people’s expense? In Statistics in Britain D.A. MacKenzie has harnessed this theory to explain the work of Francis Galton (1822-1911), Karl ...”

“... with the Pole. Living things stretch their being across immense spaces, and huge energies of the self peter out in a friendly handshake with the cosmos: so the Snow-Shoe Hare meets the Moon and the White Bear embraces all the North. In Logue’s Homer, the touch of whimsy springs from an inability to take the heroic seriously, even as a thing to attack. A ...”

“... his theory. Thus, even if his opponents are wrong to regard ‘unconscious knowledge’ as self-contradictory, like ‘unconscious pain’, Chomsky is not warranted in treating it as no more perplexing than the notion of a largely unconscious physiological process like digestion. While he alludes to the problems that currently exercise philosophers ...”