“... 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 ...”

“... significantly impedes our perception of the fact that the Gulf War was an atrocity, committed from self-interested motives by the United States and her allies. We thus have a substantial politico-ethical thesis within a theoretical. It is somehow redolent of the age in which we live that chapter after chapter is devoted to justifying the practice of claiming ...”

“... New York, that Jewish city, than anywhere else. Gilman is of course interested in the element of self-abasing Jewish behaviour caused by centuries of oppression; circumcision is still a Jewish problem in the USA, even though it seems all boy babies get circumcised unless the parents forbid it. There are, says Gilman, ‘continuities of images of the Jews in ...”

“... final illness – asking someone else to undertake this act of destruction for him. Was it a self-exculpating ploy, a way of saying ‘publish against my wishes’? (This is how W.H. Auden’s executors have construed his destructive last command.) One correspondent is notably absent from those represented in the Observer selection, Miss Jones ...”

“... to get married again without taking warning from the Wife of Bath may be one of Chaucer’s common self-simplifications, Pearsall still sees parts of Chaucer’s analysis of marriage as ‘unblinkingly hostile’, and perhaps – though this is approaching boundaries of speculation Pearsall will not cross – the result of the working out of some psychosexual ...”

“... provocation and Arab aggression; and that its military reprisals were legitimately undertaken in self-defence. The evidence gleaned by Morris from Israeli, British, American and UN archives – Arab governments do not, as a rule, open their archives to research – suggests that infiltration into Israel was a direct consequence of the displacement and ...”

“... The architects submitted plans but, after a burst of sectoral lobbying and horse-trading among self-important Western governments, not one agency headquarters was built next to the UN. Today, they are scattered in nine cities in seven countries across two continents and one (the Atlantic) ocean – which is like a country locating all its ministries ...”

“... prosperous and active cultures, mainly Anglo-Saxon, are given to behaving with a valetudinarian self-regard, which he calls ‘healthism’ and which, in America, has sought to ‘make longevity the principal measure of a good life’. ‘To be a survivor,’ Klein notes, ‘is to acquire moral distinction.’ Few people would say they wanted to die ...”

“... called ‘my other son’ only if repeatedly asked to do so. A further blow to the young man’s self-esteem was his failure to win admission to the ranks of the naval cadets, among whom his brother Nicolás was already enrolled; Francisco was sent off to the infantry academy at Toledo and eventually, as a lieutenant, joined the officer corps of the Spanish ...”

“... and its unique freshness. Wilson, it should be said, is always making judgments: scepticism and self-irony are not part of his repertoire. He did write poems, plays and novels, but they have always seemed to me neither as interesting nor as satisfying as his essays and historical studies. His own imagination simply does not soar, nor his insight pierce ...”

“... army of the good’. A moon-faced vicar or two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake ...”

“... precious to uncork. McGann turns the tables on the common judgment that Morris’s books were too self-conscious to be readable (‘beautiful but dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti stone’ in the punning words of Robert Carlton Brown, a maker of what on the evidence of McGann’s examples must be handmade books of exemplary ...”

“... that the morphology of male genitalia, which might encourage spurious sexist claims for the self-generated architectural grandeur of the male genitals, is actually a manifestation of the exercise of female choice. My big beautiful erection is her doing. Furthermore, both Kevles and Eberhard are aware that the hidden internal site for most female animal ...”

“... 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 ...”