“... European gift. ‘Our fascination’ with ‘Oriental civilisations’ stirred Egypt’s political self-awareness ‘for good and for ill’, his book begins. Passive Egypt offered ‘only minor resistance’ to invasion and occupation, he claims, until 1952, when revolution placed its antiquities in Egyptian hands – ‘for better or worse’. This is ...”

“... so long as nobody moved. Movement, clothed or unclothed, was another source of anxiety for the self-appointed guardians of public morals. Particularly troubling were the exotic dancers. ‘The dances of eastern women in the low haunts of Tunis and Rangoon’ were not, a ‘well known professor of dancing’ informed the Daily Chronicle, the sort of thing ...”

“... came to me to write it in both, with one character in the present being ‘I’, and his childhood self being ‘he’. At the book’s halfway point, it would become clear to the reader that the he and the I were one and the same; or rather, two and the same. After watching the Yeates case unfold, I decided to return to the sidelined book. Now it would be a ...”

“... Lloyd’s successive chapters cover, in similar fashion, the pageant of debates about space, the self, agency and causation, health and classifications of plants and animals, as well as others that I have already mentioned. His seventh chapter introduces a worry about all these inquiries. Does the dichotomy between nature and nurture, or, as he ...”

“... all but the last act of The Cocktail Party. Perhaps Coward’s lack of formal education made him self-conscious among intellectuals. He actively hid any hint of his own erudition from the public, despite the fact that he admired Ulysses, went regularly to Stravinsky’s ballets and quoted Shakespeare and Keats. He was also a talented linguist. There was more ...”

“... happen if their certainties were abandoned, desperately struggling to maintain their sense of self, afraid of each other’s contempt, they staggered from idealism to self-destruction.There was an enormous cultural response to the suicides. The following year, the film Germany in Autumn was made, with contributions ...”

“... and crowns, appears in the next chapter, in which England is cast (by Deasy) as a land of monetary self-sufficiency (though threatened by usurious Jewish merchants), while Ireland is recast (by Stephen) as a pawnshop, one to which he’s more in hock than most. The chapter ends as the sun profligately flings, through a chequerwork of leaves, dancing coins onto ...”

“... Sartre (with whom he occasionally had whispered exchanges), and to what seemed to be a sublime self-confidence. We were to discuss: (1) the value of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (this was Camp David time), (2) peace between Israel and the Arab world generally, and (3) the rather more fundamental question of future coexistence between Israel ...”

“... the moment when Apollo has just caught and, with his left hand, touched the fleeing Daphne, who in self-defence is turning into a laurel tree. Daphne’s mouth is open in a scream of terror, while Apollo, far from appearing a vile rapist, is portrayed as suave and dashing – in both senses. (The back story is one of malign manipulation by Cupid, who has shot ...”

“... absorbed into the kingdom of Westphalia, which was ruled by Jérôme Bonaparte, the emperor’s self-indulgent youngest brother, and was intended to become a constitutional model for other German states under French rule. The threat of Frenchification during the Napoleonic era was part of what motivated the brothers in their work as collectors of German ...”

“... consensus (as so often, the right portrayed itself as a victim – in this instance of self-righteous communists, or what Meloni today calls the ‘anti-Italian left’). Fini was still prone to making occasional statements such as ‘Berlusconi will have to work hard to prove that he can make history like Mussolini.’ But he stopped addressing ...”

“... was an explicitly populist political project, which sought to restore freedom and self-government to the people. Rothbard’s rhetoric contained strong hints of the violence that would be necessary to bring this about, violence which (paradoxically) would sometimes have to be wielded by centralised political powers against the institutions of ...”

“... Such lapses he described as ‘Errata’, out of keeping with the famous programme of self-improvement that he drew up for himself, adding ‘Humility’ to his twelve original virtues after a Quaker friend informed him of his ‘overbearing and rather insolent’ attitude. The Autobiography, sadly unfinished, is engaging and ...”

“... that reality is not a choice one might make, not a thing to opt in and out of as suits your self-interest, but a bulwark against propaganda and censorship, the essential currency of a free press. In Liberty and the News, he anatomised a problem that is even more evident a hundred years later. Could ‘government by consent … survive’, he ...”

“... he stopped thinking of the universe as somehow ‘spiritual’ in character, as Great Evolving Self. Instead, he started thinking of human selves and human languages as just devices which evolution had recently cobbled together. More important, he stopped thinking of the universe as having an intrinsic nature, as something which one might get right once ...”