“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... inauthenticity. The front is now occupied by the former back-stage anthropology of fieldworkers’ self-questioning commentary, and their letters and diaries. An interesting comment on the current vein by Clifford Geertz* demonstrates why writing whose first aim is to explore consciousness is unsuited for sending messages. Marilyn Strathern actually has got ...”

“... in the centre of a group of five Winchester scholars. Grave and gowned, he looks out with supreme self-confidence at a world he quite clearly expects to conquer. He is the epitome of the smooth and polished Wykehamist. But if that was what Crossman was in 1937, it was only part of what he was. Besides his fellowship at New College, which could easily have ...”

“... she knew or living the life that she led. About herself she’s quite reticent: not only not self-important, but not in the least introspective – her way of indicating a bad moment is to say that she can’t remember what she had for her supper that night. And in that sense she was right not to have described this as an autobiographical novel. As for ...”

“... India than of simpler and more homogeneous societies that nearly everybody can define him or her self in terms of one minority or another. Political associations based on such catch-all categories as Brahmin and non-Brahmin, Hindu and Muslim, language or region, cannot simply be deduced from social fact. Separatist movements have more usually constituted ...”

“... cabinet craftsman like Tolkien, who took years over the elaborate pedigrees and provenance of his self-contained Elfland. But in fact neither had any real feeling for language, and no more had Priestley: which makes one wonder whether popularity may not be associated with taking communication for granted, not making a style of one’s own, but using a common ...”

“... it can be called that, digs a traditional grave for women. It mires them in Nature: ‘To acquire self-knowledge of their own womanhood in a way that is separate from their motherhood seems to many women a luxury that is impossible to achieve, perhaps because both their minds and their bodies are so much more involved than would be the case for men.’ It is ...”

“... have, with a few exceptions, internalised norms which prevent dispassionate analysis and induce self-censorship, as well as a very shallow sort of news presentation. The other is that we have not yet developed a discourse that does anything more than identify with power, despite the dangers of that power in a world which has shrunk so small and become so ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have them, push to get them, keep the bidding going. Next, John’s pen-and-ink “medallion” self-portrait – Lot 80 [£100-£150] – it’s like a medal, with John in the middle, sitting naked on the floor, with a birthday message to a friend running round the edge; it’s very small, on India paper. It was a sort of birthday card John drew for a ...”

“... to a divorced wife. But children, as property and pleasure (and as that means of reflecting on the self, and of finding the self utterly absorbing to its owner, that Family, Sex and Marriage delineated) are not present in the argument here. Stone has asked the question that historians are paid to ask: how did we get to be ...”