“... antagonism or independence. But there is a poetry of pliancy which differs from mere propaganda or self-abasement. In this poetry, the words on the page bring with them an awareness that they might have been different: the strain on the bent knee is kept in view. No one, after all, would take praise in a panegyric as being merely true: the ‘judgment’ it ...”

“... at the time’, just after Fassbinder’s death. ‘Circa 1982-85. Completely unbalanced and self-indulgent. Dissolute, unconventional, ablaze.’ But he wasn’t really capable of doing so – all that is ‘everything I’ve left behind’. And though anyone wanting a straight biography or analysis of Fassbinder’s work would be better off looking ...”

“... the details of his battling life became publicly known and he was sanctified. The image of poor self-sacrificing ‘St Charles’ has been a hindrance ever since.‘We have waited a long time for the definitive full-scale scholarly biography of Charles Lamb,’ Jonathan Bate asserts on the back cover of Eric Wilson’s book, ‘but now it has arrived.’ In ...”

“... short of embracing the full implications of his insights. Having identified the stultifying ‘self-system’ created by social and parental pressure to conform, he had failed to mount the aggressive challenges to family and society that should have followed. Instead, like his more conventional colleagues, he had limited his goals to helping patients ...”

“... of innocent Sikhs by Congress-led hoodlums. Like Mrs Gandhi in India, America has been a great, self-appointed proponent of democracy in the modern world, while, in actuality, it has treated it as a nuisance and an obstruction when it gets in the way of its self-interest. It now justifies war by speaking of the ‘will of ...”

“... she fascinates at the same time that she puzzles the reader. At one moment apparently self-centred and brazen, and the next unselfish and considerate; on occasion grasping and penurious, and then with sentimental generosity capable of giving away almost all she had; at times a fretful wife and mother, but seldom shirking disagreeable ...”

“... which made his heart thump. While Burns enjoyed making his pen run away with him in his wildly self-stimulated, hyperbolic letters, his verse is often more sober and politically consequent. The poems (‘The Twa Dogs’, for instance) reveal a sophisticated radicalism, based on much reading and discussing. Scathing as he was about unearned privilege and ...”

“... discredited the very idea of the sublime, shown us that ‘when saintliness is not a con, it is self-deception’? Kleinberg, temperamentally inclined to such reductionism, is nevertheless unsatisfied by it, and his book is an extended exploration of the larger implications of his own conflict. What account can we give of charisma, the appeal of ...”

“... conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of self-importance,’ and who, moreover, ‘hate foreigners, especially if they come from “inferior” races’. The sociological precision of the snobbish anathema is unique neither to Trevor-Roper nor to the patrician soft right; but it is characteristic of his ...”

“... is some talk in the play about Auden’s propensity to edit his poems, with his older self censoring what in his younger self he found dishonest or embarrassing. I think he was mistaken, but provided the original survives, which it does both in print and in his readers’ heads, it doesn’t seem to me to matter ...”

“... means satisfying the preferences that people actually have, then it should put other-regarding and self-regarding preferences on the same footing; conversely, if liberalism rules other-regarding preferences out, then it is those preferences, rather than Pareto, which conflict with liberalism. Anyway, it’s hard to see why Sen revisits the debate at all: he ...”

“... goes, they are having an affair. An interest in underwear is an interest in a hidden, sexual self. Some women find the existence of this secret self very empowering. They feel better in a meeting because no one knows how sexy they are, under their clothes. Is it mad to buy them, or mad to count them? How are they ...”

“... the Magician and his unhallowed abortion are with the boat engulphed in the waves.’ Peake’s self-parody, Another Piece of Presumption, staged at the Adelphi Theatre in October 1823, has a tailor called Dr Frankinstitch who kills his nine assistants in order to construct his creature (on the proverbial grounds that ‘nine tailors make a man’); it ends ...”

“... recycled, of course. It uses the phrase ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ in the appropriately self-deprecating way. And the connection finally settled on between one’s own kitchen habits and the horror of that belching landfill is cunningly laconic: thrifty food is, apparently, ‘tasty and infinitely, almost smugly, rewarding’ – that reader-sparing ...”

“... national myth, he says, makes it hard for us to be objective about Mary’s reign. ‘Even in our self-consciously secular times, 16th-century stereotypes, consolidated in the triumph of Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth, persist in popular culture.’ We still cherish a ‘Black legend’ of Catholicism, he says, and instances ‘the lurid portrayal of ...”