“... riddle: what does the tale of rape and cannibalism in Thrace have in common with the Buddha’s self-sacrifice in his animal incarnation? Empson knew a lot about Buddhism, which he saw as representing a stage of religious development from which Christianity, with its equation of love with torture, was a regression. Moreover he had argued, in his lost book ...”

“... was crucial. This verbal habit of the King’s was presumably the attempt of a nervous and self-conscious man to prevent the conversation from flagging – always a danger in chats with the monarch since the subject is never certain whether he or she is expected to reply or when. The onset of the King’s mania delivered him from ...”

“... mean totally different things). I don’t want to imply either that this awareness constitutes a self-evident argument in our favour or that we set out to find a compromise between two opposed extremes. Admittedly, I would have been as worried if all our recommendations had been unreservedly welcomed by the Police Federation as if they had all been ...”

“... to such a level that even the Tories themselves are interspersing their frenzies of patronage and self-aggrandisement with calls for moderation and integrity in public office, rather as the inveterate drunk forswears all alcohol during a hangover. The corruption of this long era of Conservative rule extends beyond personal venality. Though loudly committed to ...”

“... to read a piece against Rushdie that does not contain such a disclaimer), before lapsing into self-pity: ‘I do not expect many to listen to arguments like mine. The colonial prejudices are still too ingrained.’ There has long been a Berger scale for fatuity, but that piece, even in the judgment of seasoned seismographers, went clear off the graph. Was ...”

“... of Internal Affairs. Alhaji Lateef Jakande, a minister in the last civilian government and a self-proclaimed democrat, became Minister of Works and Housing. Dr Olu Onagoruwa, a constitutional lawyer of otherwise impeccable credentials, became Attorney-General and Minister of Justice. Onagoruwa’s participation was the most perplexing since he had made ...”

“... the social pleasures except conversation … inflexible, unforgiving … secretive … obsessively self-regarding’. It’s as well to have it over in the first paragraph. As Baudrillard puts it, ‘There are those who let the dead bury the dead, and there are those who are forever digging them up to finish them off.’The editors’ introduction highlights ...”

“... and a ‘dowdy trollop’. Hazlitt can, and did, look after himself. He was a spiky, awkward, self-absorbed man: total frankness was his forte – ‘I say what I think; I think what I feel.’ Though he was, in the opinion of his friends, ‘substantially insane’ during his three-year infatuation with Sarah, he picked himself off the floor, got married ...”

“... only by jiggering about with the ‘his’ in its title; a sometimes obsessional liking for self-administered enemas; above all, that curious cartoon-like balloon that seems to hover above the heads of the Gurney family bearing the words, ‘Ah, what we could tell you should we but choose!’ Ronald preceded his opinion about Iron Discipline with the ...”

“... parts of the main musical chapter, their continuity with the 1918 ‘Philosophy of Music’ is self-evident, not least in the ‘Hollow Space’ (Der Hohlraum, a concept first considered in the book’s discourse on architecture) where the heroic Schoenberg of Geist der Utopie is at last reunited with his subsequent achievement. On his return to Germany ...”

“... of our century. Perhaps, too, there is a suspicion – unworthy? – that bound up with Hans’s self-denying ordinance was a distinct cultural bias. Gallic music, Gallic culture generally, was not his scene. I have referred earlier to his conservatism, and surely part of the abstention from Debussy had its roots in an Austro-German tradition which found it ...”

“... he knew, by his decision to turn his back on the spectacle. It is the severity of Turgenev’s self-judgment, and the sincerity of his self-exposure, that allows him to personify and at the same time to assert societal guilt.Turgenev was then 51. He was the son of a tyrant. His mother, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, was ...”

“... Nonconformism and a much more radical local proletariat. They demanded incorporation – municipal self-government – and electoral reform. The pact broke down in the Bull Ring riots of 1839, when shopkeepers and factory owners supported the violent suppression of Chartist demonstrations by the Metropolitan Police, bussed in for the occasion. For the next ...”

“... MacDonald, as if the authentic Bowie had revealed himself at last. But the concept of an authentic self, slippery at the best of times, has almost no purchase at all when it comes to Bowie. ‘I’m very happy with Ziggy, I think he was a very successful character and I think I played him very well, but I’m glad I’m me now,’ he says earnestly in Cracked ...”

“... belonging together of ecstasy and antipathy, or fixation and bewilderment – elation, absurdity, self-loss, panic, disbelief – is basic to Picasso’s understanding of sex, and therefore of human life au fond. And the very word ‘fascination’ speaks to the normality of the intertwining: its Latin root, fascinus, means simply ‘erect penis’.) But ...”