“... of a Student’s Life, published in 1925. It is this book, with its fey charm and its self-regarding anecdotes, inevitably putting its author centre-stage (Harrison meets and impresses Gladstone; George Eliot admires Harrison’s wallpaper; Harrison reflects wistfully on love in old age), that has in large part fed the recent explosion of interest ...”

“... clearly given to fits of lunacy (he himself describes paralysis and amnesia, and his paranoia is self-evident). Amongst the achievements of his last years was an erotic lesbian love poem (which ends with a lesbian marriage). This was written in Italian when passion restored him briefly to his senses (and to his knowledge of the language), and he hoped it ...”

“... is early slang for “homosexual”, and “man of all trades”, in a gay context, self-explanatory.’ (She does not cite the delightful, if apocryphal, story of the woman who had a crush on the handsome and multi-talented Bernstein and replied, on being told that he was gay: ‘Is there nothing that that man can’t do?’) She goes on to ...”

“... his ‘just a’ body from dead. What if rather than crucifixion he’d opted for suffering lowly self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than ‘just a shell’, he’d raised his personality, say, or the Idea of Himself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? Done the Crusades? Burned witches? Easter was a body and blood ...”

“... and no training in its methods and ideas. Ethnopsychiatry was, as McCulloch says, ‘very much a self-enclosed enterprise’. The effects of the professional isolation of ethnopsychiatry, within medicine and from anthropology, were exacerbated by the fact that the most extensive facilities were in the settler colonies, and the ethnopsychiatrists were members ...”

“... on the trial confession was still only a cross. Denied other routes, Maria Janis used prodigious self-denial to command attention, in the manner of the heroines of Christian folklore and history; though ecstatic mysticism still continued – with its somatic signs, like stigmata – the phenomenon dwindled as women gained access to literacy and other ...”

“... so well what counts as a solution? How do the sciences manage the trick of being, in a way, self authenticating, internally determining what shall count as true or false? The book is written as a historical sketch of how we got to here. The accounts of the incidents have been competently checked against standard histories. There’s close attention to ...”

“... mutated with the years to a more glitzy Romy. She seems to exist in the book almost as the shadow self of Lyndall Gordon, who herself married young, travelled to America where her husband worked, had children, postnatal depression, and finally got down to a career in academe, and the writing of two literary biographies. Meanwhile Romy – who was the plump ...”

“... all things as beings in time and objects of possible experience ... [and] the beginning of these self-same beings as supersensible’. However, this notion of time passing into timeless eternity is equally problematic: ‘an end of all things as objects of the senses’ is inconceivable, and the idea that the moment which determines the end of the sensible ...”

“... 1941, when the United States was finally forced into combat in spite of FDR’s malevolently self-interested vacillations and hesitations (it is true that the non-interventionist camp was very strong in Congress, but it is also true that FDR was unwilling to pay even the smallest political price, or accept the slightest political risk, to force the pace ...”

“... who has what I’d call an unusually good memory for apparel, possessed that keen sense of self-preservation that the more emotional ‘Dick’ Hannay lacked. ‘I certainly didn’t address him the way I had at other times, as Mr Hoover.’ I should just about think not. A year later, Mrs Rosenstiel, still a martyr to her hubby’s specialised ...”

“... the fourth syllable. Victorian hymn music came under attack early in this century, censured for self-indulgence, cloying chromaticism and ‘vulgar lusciousness’. These charges are accepted by Bradley a little too readily. Jolly though it is to hear the High Victorians accused of decadence, we may wonder how far the accusation is just; if these composers ...”

“... general worry about identity politics: ‘If what matters about me is my individual and authentic self, why is so much contemporary talk of identity about large categories – race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality – that seem so far from the individual?’ But much of it is specific to race consciousness, for race in Appiah’s view is such a ...”

“... who fancies himself ‘the last of the Bohemians’ and survives, he likes to say, on ‘air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches and ketchup’. He claims that he understands the cawing of seagulls so well that he can translate poetry into it, and notes that the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are particularly suited to ...”

“... folkways he so lately debunked, turning native on his own patch. Latter-day examples include the self-styled ‘Post-Modern bourgeois liberal’ Richard Rorty. The politics of this turn tend to the folksy – in an arch, snowstorm-paperweight-collecting kind of way – if not downright völkisch. And, as Clifford Geertz has noted, the wogs start long before ...”