“... was that suggested by von Neumann’s later work: the mathematics of computation, especially of self-reproducing automata (robots that can make other robots), with its requirements for close attention to the computational limitations of different categories of abstract machine. Instead, led by Cowles, economics took Bourbaki’s route towards abstraction ...”

“... through these things in fantasy and come out the other side. Dostoevsky’s epilepsy was a form of self-punishment for his wish, a revulsion from its extravagant historical completion. According to this logic, Dostoevsky’s actual punishment, in 1849, for his membership of a group of young socialists – along with his fellows he was subjected to a mock ...”

“... the fatal doctor thinks, his love only imperfectly distinguishable from pity or his pity from self-pity. He has somehow mislaid everything in his life that matters to him – mislaid or rejected or destroyed, incapable of receiving what he most requires. The boundaries of his being have failed. His life is not his life; he himself has no life; he is ...”

“... All three men cast disabused eyes over the ruthless spy chiefs, priggish civil servants and self-seeking diplomats who notice such things about them. And from the ‘calves-foot jelly’, ‘essence of beef’ and ‘breast of chicken from the jar’ fed to the convalescing Leamas to the ‘glass-fronted sentry box with a “Scenes of ...”

“... be stretched to encompass an unwavering air of innocence, combined with an evident capacity for self-delusion and, when it suited him, ruthlessness. Naivety is neither good nor bad in itself, and many famous politicians have had their share of it. But unless Blair, far from being the regular guy as which he likes to project himself, is a hypocrite of ...”

“... league. I had a paper round. I had a girlfriend. I was obsessed and terrified by my own burgeoning self. I was, in other words, a perfectly normal teenage boy. Which is probably why I went looking for trouble. I’d become a convert at the age of 16 when I attended a rally in London: it was in Central Hall, Westminster, and was led by a man called John ...”

“... tries to be bubbly about its degeneracy, but it’s mostly just a jokeless, pulpless exercise in self-abuse. Of course it tends to like lagers and motors, fighting and hooligans, and imagines the rest of the world is fraudulent and missing out because it has other things on its mind. What’s sad about the magazine is that, despite its defensive bluster, it ...”

“... in the world of The Plot against America. It is another matter. Politics for the informed but self-absorbed Kepesh is a way of talking about the arrangements of his private life. He is funny, and of course he has a point about sexual freedom. There is a difference between responsible behaviour and the endless, pointless provision of misery for ...”

“... a realist and a determined unrealist that he could seemingly invent a strange Christian sect of self-mutilated castrates and a cannibal who takes along a green companion on his journey lest he run short of food along the way, and then reveal in an afterword that such practices were well documented in the Russia of the time – which is rather like finding a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”