“... sense. But ‘neither our European competitors nor the Japanese can be blamed for the long list of self-inflicted wounds,’ insists Luttwak, ‘that are directly causing the Third-Worldisation of America. They had nothing to do with the most original invention of American statecraft since the Constitution: Representation Without Taxation by limitless ...”

“... all texts are figural’ – rhetorical or fictional – ‘through and through, whatever their self-professed logical status.’ Richard Rorty, who identifies philosophy merely as ‘a kind of writing’, also believes, according to Norris, that ‘literary critics had best give up the idea that philosophy (or “theory”) is capable of solving any ...”

“... led by Pinel and the Tukes is seen as substituting ‘mind-forged manacles’ of guilt and self-control for the chains of the old order; the incarceration of the insane in asylums, and their subjection to the ever watchful gaze of their keepers, emerge as part of a broader development of administrative machinery for the maintenance of social control ...”

“... emergence of Dominion status is one obvious example of that. The commitment, however vague, to self-rule for India, and the dependence on the good will of the Indian princes, are another. The great miscalculation of German policy before 1914 was the assumption that the world was waiting to be liberated from British oppression. Instead, enough of the world ...”

“... and an artless one; few public figures can be less concerned with the presentation of self, less calculating of the effect produced. Hence the famous gaffes. The foot went into the mouth quite early. At a first night of Romeo and Juliet in 1919, Ellen Terry’s last professional appearance, the Terry family was out in force. Gielgud’s ...”

“... elaborate. Darnton is not suggesting that the imagery on which the cat-killings drew was entirely self-conscious, or that the killers ‘knew’ what they were doing to the extent that the ‘text’ they devised was meant to be ‘read’ by the master and his mistress with the same degree of precision with which the historian is able to read it. The power ...”

“... In the schoolroom morals are squeezed out of them: in the theatre they provide the vehicles for self-seeking actors, ambitious Lord Chamberlains and profiteers out to make money from evening entertainments. They’re plundered and castrated; so they survive ... A rigid cult would be dangerous, like the ceremonial which forbade Byzantine courtiers to touch ...”

“... articles about their experiences and cunningly sweetening them up with nature notes. ‘Take this self-taught peasant for all in all,’ wrote the Times in 1835. ‘Cobbett remained to the end a peasant,’ wrote G.D.H. Cole in 1924 – and he printed as epigraph to his biography an elegy on Cobbett about ‘gentle nature’s stern prose bard, her mightiest ...”

“... to be that things have not changed much in the Emerald Isle, another ought to be that their own self-satisfaction is misplaced. Of the ‘facts’ of early English history which Every Schoolboy Knows – Alfred and the Cakes, Canute and the Waves, Harold and the Arrow – only the last has any claim to be in a real sense true (and even that has only ...”

“... a problem did not exist. (She has an interesting parenthesis here concerning the Roman Church’s self-confidence about sex-laws, contrasting the present Pope’s confidence about contraception with his reluctance to denounce Belfast terrorists.) But Hadrian, in another time from Zeno’s, merely ‘prefers to seek his lovers outside the rather hermetic world ...”

“... so-and-so.’ Obviously, any system with more than one such exceptionless principle in it courts self-contradiction. But the notion of an exceptionless moral system as employed by philosophers is that the principles should not conflict – and to avoid that they will normally have to come equipped with ‘unless’ clauses. (It is true that Kant thought ...”

“... is a troubled, Dickensian lost child in a man’s body; the angular Sotgui Kouyate as the saintly self-denying Bhishma has the sad grace of an elongated sculpture from Nigeria or New Guinea, and something of the tragedy of a calcinated Giacometti figure. Just as we have recently learned to see ‘Modernist Primitivism’ in painting and sculpture as a complex ...”

“... how those trapped in the situation could have taken those other ways out. War with Argentina is self-evidently a ludicrous way of making the simple point that a transfer of sovereignty ought to take place only with the consent of the Falklanders; thirteen months of hardship, picket-line battles, lost production and the huge expenses of generating ...”

“... She sought to demonstrate their emotional kinship and general compatibility. Her letters became a self-presentation that included an account of her opinions and a depiction of her physical attractions, passionate nature, and quality as a sexual partner – all to convince Hermann of her desirability. She assured him that she was the sort of woman he ...”

“... vulnerable countries with low emissions. But in this case it is not necessarily just a matter of self-interest prevailing over honesty and virtue. Climate change creates what Gardiner calls ‘a perfect moral storm’, within which it is difficult to keep one’s bearings. The key elements of this storm, which he enumerates with admirable – if exhausting ...”