“... terms of other people’s malevolence, rather than his unfittedness. To write the biography of so self-centred and self-absorbed a figure almost exclusively from his own papers necessarily results in the tortured reasoning, the special pleading and the selective use of evidence which are all displayed here in a vain attempt ...”

“... sympathetically and reassuringly to me on my arrival had meant a great deal to me: but even their self-assurance was in large part derived from the fact that they knew they were parts of a system much larger than themselves. However, the system did have a haphazard workhouse or almshouse side to its activities whose existence I would never have suspected ...”

“... showed himself to be the more authentic deconstructionist when he admitted that the persistence of self-identical objects over time cannot be either confidently asserted or denied. Hume also said in similar vein that ‘a true sceptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical conviction’ (Treatise, VII). That is the ...”

“... that he had betrayed Sam. And fear of appearing ridiculous. He might act the fool but that was a self-protective game: you shout loudest what you fear most. Perhaps, in the end, that was the real truth of it. He had preferred to shelter behind the lie of this oldest taboo, rather than commit himself to his folly; jump with both feet into the deep end of an ...”

“... Mr Hersh offers one explanation and one only: that Kissinger was ambitious, unscrupulous and self-serving. Everything he did was to gain power for himself. If that were the whole story, Dr Kissinger would have been unmasked years ago. From time to time Mr Hersh is forced to admit that Kissinger was brilliant, that he dazzled the press corps, that he ...”

“... the House of Commons in the tones befitting that palladium of our liberties. Walter Bagehot’s self-image was no less vivid, though certainly different, as he projected it onto the persona of the modern reviewer, ‘glancing lightly from topic to topic, suggesting deep things in jest, unfolding unanswerable argument in an absurd illustration’, for all ...”

“... a magazine for the working woman, and its title, in the best traditions of the me-generation, was Self. The cover advertised articles with titles like ‘The Problems of the Kept Man’ and ‘What if He Says No?’ But what attracted my attention was the rather Californian injunction flashed in bold letters across the top: ‘Let’s Be Real!’ Of such ...”

“... more isolated than ever before. Contemporary rhetoric – the talk of ‘caring’, the self-celebration and the pious toughness – conceal an authoritarian certainty that the good society can be created by an alteration of attitude, a shift in moral direction. Like Clintonism, both the new feminism and the new radical centre are resolutely ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... feasts. All the same, the gestures of the officers, forks and glasses in hand, will seem less self-evidently absurd to anyone who has read van Alkemade or Schama and is aware of the importance of festival rituals in 17th-century culture. This example is very far from being the only one in which Schama juxtaposes the evidence of contemporary writers with ...”

“... days in the cold winter of our discontent when we seem to enjoy a truce from the struggle of self-assertion to abandon oneself to the abandon of a woman who seems to live and breathe only for us ... to pick out with a lobster fork all the sweetness that life has to offer in its most inaccessible tentacles ... For ... each moment has its cash value, and ...”