“... teaches us to think of ourselves as if we were all ‘entrepreneurs’. The emphasis on ‘self-realisation’, ‘finding out what you really want and going for it’ and so on, is typically coupled with a sublime faith that if each person ‘realises his true goals’ then all will be for the best with society – and this is nothing but Adam ...”

“... of the supernatural. None of them left any autobiographical documents that compare, in depth of self-revelation, with those of the less reticent and more literary Victorians who searched their souls as the higher criticism of the Bible, the geological theories that reduced Genesis to a bundle of myths, and scientific materialism, wrought havoc with their ...”

“... principles of Locke and Berkeley, belief in the external world, in induction, and even in the self, was ungrounded and unreasonable. The conclusion was that our knowledge could reach no further than our present and perhaps past mental states. Reason had demonstrated the falsity of some of our deepest, even instinctive, beliefs. A rival interpretation ...”

“... very expensive City suit, the healthy confidence of skin and voice, the profound self assurance of manner and gesture, seemed to belong in a different, moneyed or orthodox-political world.’ Lewis also notices that, beneath ‘the broker’s manner’, the officer has ‘a better than adequate level of scientific knowledge’. An older man ...”

“... In view of all this, one is tempted to proscribe any further dealings with one’s apocalyptic self, for fear of giving comfort to the enemy. But it won’t do: that self is in all of us, for good and for ill, and if repressed will only the sooner start infecting our human intercourse. Lawrence, though pre-nuclear, still ...”

“... was a mere barbarian princeling). The book is not a biography but a portrait, indeed a kind of self-portrait, an attempt to explore K’ang-Hsi’s mind by making a kind of jigsaw or mosaic of the Emperor’s personal opinions, which are to be found scattered here and there in the official documents of the period, and arranging them under headings such as ...”

“... is in our activities, the more effectively we can serve society. This last proposition is not self-evidently valid and is rejected by a great many of our paymasters. Populist anti-intellectualism extends to fear and resentment of research. That penicillin or pocket calculators or meteorological satellites would not exist unless someone had done the basic ...”

“... combined with his need to be liked, which drove him eventually to the unreasonable lengths of self-vindication of which this latest book, and its mammoth predecessor, are classics. There were already signs of paranoia at an early stage of his Prime Ministership. What was called his kitchen Cabinet at Number 10 was more like a medieval court, a centre of ...”

“... a single episode, garnished with a gloss of elementary social anthropology, is meant to proclaim self-evident significance. This is simply the imaginative re-creation of a momentous enterprise, set in the framework of an important historical argument. As such it will become one of the classics of modern historical literature. Much of the originality of the ...”

“... weight. (Kundera reminds us that the rise of the novel is both the expression of ever-increasing self-consciousness, and its antidote. By representing ourselves in fictions we escape from the unbearable insubstantiality of awareness. In Cartesian formula: we create the Archers, therefore we exist.) Kundera has always been a flashy writer, his chief interest ...”

“... to be in the intentional state I am in’ into the intentional state itself, thus making the state self-referential. If we do so, we shall be able to be internalists. We can continue to assert, pace Kripke and Putnam, that ‘meanings are in the head.’ We can continue to say, with Frege, that sense determines reference, because our sense of what a sense is ...”

“... close friend of Johnson and his circle. The seasonal character of his life – the depression and self-doubt which settled on him when he returned to Edinburgh and ‘duty’, the joyous sense of liberation when he set off on his annual journeys to the south – was now set. This volume begins with Boswell taking pious resolutions: he was happy in his new ...”

“... is the norm. So Shapiro takes a mistress, a ‘respectable’ woman since he can’t stomach a self-admitted whore. In company with her slatternly daughter Micki and Micki’s rapacious boyfriend, Liza does her best to milk Shapiro dry. After a particularly ugly late-night scene with Liza and Micki, Shapiro runs home to Celia – whom he finds, like a ...”

“... that we have climbed, not into an imitation of some aspect of the turn-of-the-century, but into a self-mocking myth which at first, unlike Fevvers, has a little trouble getting off the ground. Things are clearer once we have been given Fevvers’ past life, and the novel moves from London to St Petersburg and Siberia. Fevvers has signed up with a circus run ...”

“... she grows more endearing to the reader, who also gives her credit for being more reflective and self-critical than Fred, a more fully-engaged researcher and a more committed lover. Vinnie’s affair and its dénouement would not move us as it does if the love affair of the more presentable couple had not been developed first. Not that the Fred plot is ...”