“... on the Stanford Humanities core-curriculum. Nevertheless, for all his zest in being his successful self, one guesses that he feels fenced in. More particularly, he evidently has mixed feelings about his loyal public, with their insatiable demand for more of the same. He has, for all his energy and versatility, become a franchised product and he doesn’t like ...”

“... statement of his conservative creed – the essay on Freedom. An added charm is the not quite self-deprecating humour exhibited by some of the best remarks in the book, as when Quine writes (in the essay on Communication): Examples taper off to where communication is less firmly assured, as when Hegel writes, ‘Truth is in league with reality against ...”

“... character in Shusaku Endo’s Scandal. Suguro is in his sixties, a successful man, methodical, self-disciplined, attentive to household obligations and the needs of his ailing wife, a man in the midst of life, with the taste of death on his tongue and the shapes of death in his dreams. He is by profession a novelist and by religion a Roman ...”

“... speeches without comment or dissent and only when Boguslavskaya (Mrs Voznesensky) makes a long self-regarding speech and shortly afterwards sweeps out does one get some hint that they think she is tiresome too. Breakfast (food again) is self-service and is generally a relatively tranquil meal, but this morning I come ...”

“... good dust-jacket. The front reproduces Lucian Freud’s Interior with plant, reflection listening (self-portrait), a picture of the painter, ear cupped, looking through the foliage of a spider-grass plant, foreshortened to the size of a huge jungle tree. The back has a photograph of Aldiss, whisky glass in hand, contemplating himself in a baroque full-length ...”

“... in town. Not that an ideology brought cognitive science into being or made it flourish, in any self-aware way. It is computer science – somehow a science in no need of authenticating – which nourished cognitive science and furnished it with authority. This does not go without saying, for it is deeply connected with the focus on achievement. A theory of ...”

“... the Palestinians, died last year. His book is a moving testament to his humanity and capacity for self-criticism, an old man’s mea culpa on behalf of his country and the movement to which he dedicated his life. Realising in old age that he ‘had always been under the influence of certain myths that had become accepted as historical truth’, he decided to ...”

“... arguing Hong Kong’s case and carrying Peking’s pronouncements back. But sometimes a narrower self-interest plays a part. One of the more saddening developments in the last two years has been the cynical manner in which local capitalists have united with the Chinese Communist leaders in opposing the growth of democracy in Hong Kong. For Peking, an ...”

“... not altogether nice Mme de Haussonville (we have her own word for that: she wrote of her young self that ‘there were two persons inside me, the good and the evil, and the evil usually overcame the good’) and Baronne James de Rothschild, who surprises you by her modern face, handsome, but also intelligent and amusing. In their own terms, these are ...”

“... and decay then how can one confront those ghosts of the past without hearing a mocking voice of self-justification? To beat that, one needs a black superman, an embodiment not only of suffering but of virtue and wisdom. And there have been so many disappointments. Nkrumah turned out to be a despot, Nyerere and Kaunda destroyed their own countries and did ...”

“... from obscurity to attention, like Blake, Poe, Browning and many others; those he brought to self-attention, like Swinburne, Morris, Burne-Jones; and everyone from Whistler to Yeats – there were many – whose imaginations were shifted or shaped by his ideas and practice. Though not much now remembered, between approximately 1848 and 1912 Rossetti ...”

“... depend on a one-to-one comparison. Second, it gives a result with regard to the demand for self-sacrifice different from the result it gives with regard to principles governing the conduct of impartial third parties. In the latter type of case, Scanlon holds that it is right to save the larger number, when the threatened losses are comparable (as they ...”

“... himself as definitively cured, he explained his cure in terms of the homeliest old-fashioned self-help. The ‘real clue to the labyrinth’ and basis of his recovery, he told Putnam, was eating enough, feeding as little fatteningly as possible, and having plenty of distractions. This brings us to a major issue in regard to Leon Edel’s great ...”

“... war. But he has taken enormous pains to ensure that his claims to generality are underpinned by a self-questioning poetic strategy, which both lays bare the mechanisms of imaginative fiction and then contrives to work with them nonetheless. The result is a book which is far from easy to read. Occasionally Mackay Brown’s refusal to pamper us by remaining ...”

“... did not really make an impact till after 1940. Sceptical anti-suffragist politicians (however self-interested) understood this situation when they doubted suffragist claims about what the vote would do for women. All four books are properly documented, and only Garner is sometimes inaccurate on details: The Vote was not a ‘WSPU paper’, but the organ ...”