“... becomes almost irresistible; and it is relied on to produce a fortunate and economical result: self-censorship. We stay out of trouble by gagging ourselves. Among the few motives that may strengthen the power of resistance is the consciousness of having been deeply wrong oneself, either regarding some abstract question or in personal or public ...”

“... writing about France, in quantities no neighbouring land can rival. Confronted with this mass of self-description, what can the alien gaze hope to add? The advantages of estrangement, would be the anthropological reply – Lévi-Strauss’s regard lointain. But in England we lack the discipline of real distance. France is all too misleadingly familiar: the ...”

“... are all luxury wars and people are very proud of the way we are fighting, the quick victories, the self-image of the brave Israeli – very flattering! Yes, Israelis have fought well, and for the most part the Arabs haven’t: but how is it that, as has been the case for much of this century, the premises on which Western support for Israel is based are still ...”

“... at the hospital that morning looking even after weeks of illness not much different from her usual self; weeping and distraught, it’s true, but still plump and pretty, clutching her everlasting handbag and still somehow managing to face the world. As I followed my father down the ward I wondered why we were bothering: there was no such person here. He ...”

“... papers and letters over the past sixty years has helped to establish this sense of a Yeatsian self in constant re-creation. Ann Saddlemyer’s biography of George Yeats, short on analysis and long on meticulously researched detail, at times verging on the unreadable, offers a more taxing version of the life of Mrs Yeats than Brenda Maddox’s George’s ...”

“... took hold; ‘modern’ subjects, such as history, languages and science, were introduced; a new self-consciousness developed about educating the governing and administrative class of the future; and the sense of the universities’ place in the national culture grew. Second, in the 1870s and 1880s new universities were established in the great cities which ...”

“... a faint blue pastel to her palette. And that, kids, was that.It is impossible to overstate their self-effacing beauty. Martin herself wrote that she believed the function of art to be ‘the renewal of memories of moments of perfection’. Making art seems to have been a kind of meditation for her: she meant her paintings as aids to contemplation ...”

“... naive to have misgivings about using Keats for anecdotes in which he himself figured as the nobly self-sacrificing friend and witness. These sentimentalities he communicated to Shelley, who, less naive, used them to concoct in the elegy ‘Adonais’ a version of Keats as a ‘young flower … blighted in the bud’, a hapless youth attended in his need by ...”

“... was required to redress it? In its years of power, the PT had done little to foster a culture of self-critical analysis; or reflection on where it, or the country, was going. Intellectuals had been useful as a bridge to public visibility in the early days. Once in office, though many – perhaps most – continued to support it, the party essentially ignored ...”

“... of an English aristocrat – tall, handsome, cultivated’ and a natural Tory. The latter was a self-made man in a world almost entirely without them, ‘brilliant but with a reputation of being ruthlessly ambitious, unreliable and too clever by half’. Both had links to Ireland, and both had disrupted upbringings. Castlereagh was educated at Cambridge and ...”

“... as well as with himself: a sort of art-historical Humbert Humbert with traces of Clive Linley, the self-obsessed composer in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. He also has an Irish Catholic background replete with sodomitical priests and echoes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This upbringing has made him unable to separate a love of art from sexual ...”

“... troubles: he had been barely a month in the job. Whatever hopes Ahern may have cherished that his self-sacrifice would be rewarded with a plum EU position disappeared. The Lisbon vote revealed a striking distrust of the main political parties, which despite holding more than 90 per cent of seats in the Dáil were unable to muster a majority of voters behind ...”

“... after Karakozov’s attack. Chernyshevsky intended his character to be a parody of the self-sacrificing saint, an object of amusement and ridicule rather than emulation. Verhoeven also suggests that Karakozov influenced Crime and Punishment, which Dostoevsky was writing for serialised publication at the time. Thanks to Karakozov, she ...”

“... when you were a girl, that is true. How have you become Céline? I love you anyway. Love, Self The transplanted features of a realist novel are still recognisable here – that detail of the boys with their ‘skateboards aloft like swords’, for example – but the tendency is towards the free association and creepy lyricism of Mrs ...”