“... unlike Ian Kennedy’s. Of course, compared to what Szasz fed Kennedy, the food which the self-supporting Szasz received from Freud is mere sweets and biscuits (candy and cookies to him), nor does he ever misrepresent Freud’s thought as his. The psychological reminder remains that whenever we feel like biting, we might usefully ask ourselves ...”

“... scheme of all was undertaken by the Earl of Bedford, one of the leaders of the political group self-consciously opposed to other royal policies. Thus the tension appears to have arisen not from a division between court and country but from prejudices entertained against Fenlanders by the rest of English society. It might be added that Fenland drainage had ...”

“... a cheery, well-adjusted trio, but there is, it must be said, something a bit dubious in Perry’s self-profile: he is ‘a psychologist (licensed in Vermont), a sexologist (certified by the American College of Sexologists) and a biofeed-back practioner (certified by the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America)’. He is also an ordained, if not ...”

“... from the Publishers’ Weekly, sales are so good that the project is well on the way to becoming self-sustaining, and that in all but one exceptional case they badly underestimated the print-runs of the early volumes. They already have designs on the heritage of American painting. I suppose the normal British reaction to all this would be to point out that ...”

“... to the book with benevolence and admiration. Kingsley Amis has admitted – with only a measure of self-parody – that he doesn’t want to read any more books that don’t begin: ‘A shot rang out.’ Richard Cobb’s second volume of autobiography, nominally about Shrewsbury and Oxford, opens with a man getting off the boat train at the Gare Saint-Lazare ...”

“... that the books ‘are without exception personal’; that they are ‘neither straightforward nor self-explanatory’ and have ‘an especial unlikeness to anyone else’s writing’; that ‘they rarely conform to the classic genres.’ There is exaggeration here, but part of the emphasis is just. Ruskin’s forms are often unusual, and in several ...”

“... than a yard outside a stable. But the faces of the men are on the whole stern with defiance and self-importance, or grim with the humiliation of defeat. The women, too, have a dignity which is not derived solely from their voluminous skirts and elaborate bonnets. History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors. It is hard for the reader, looking at ...”

“... he knows that ‘reform eugenics’ contained class-dependent bias, that it may even have been self-deluding. Yet his account of post-Penrosian genetics, as in the work of R. A. Fisher, errs on the side of naivety; and not everyone will agree with him about the amount of degenerationist thinking that lingered in the scientific work of the 1930s. He is, for ...”

“... dismisses celebration of its achievements during the Medieval period as ‘European self-denigration’ deriving from ‘obsession with “extensive” power’. The fourth defect springs directly from the third. Mann’s answer to the ‘old question’ places much emphasis – and plausibly so – on the early date by which the institutions of ...”

“... would say he was older than they are, and hungrier; at once more astute and purposeful and less self-serving; that his social roots were at least one-and-a-half classes below theirs; that he is a Huck to their Tom. On both sides in different ways, their relationship depends on guilt, weakness, secrecy and inequality. They seem at times to be little more ...”

“... Irremediable ignorance, entirely inappropriate customary behaviour, and, worst of all, the crass self-conceit of medical doctors, were the reasons for their misguided practices in the nurturing of their children. Mrs Fildes’s authoritativeness springs from the fact that she was herself a professional nurse of babies and children, and is also a mother. She ...”

“... I think of ancient bronzes: a thin-skinned balloon of brown-green metal, light and yet strong, self-consciously opposed both to the ‘pitiless bronze’ of ancient weapons and armour, and to the blockish stone sculptures with which they had to share ancient exhibition space, unmalleable marbles that could never imagine kicking back so high and with such ...”

“... variety of leaves have been exhaustively documented by botanists over the centuries. Linnaeus, the self-styled father of modern botany, listed more than sixty different types of simple leaf (i.e. leaves not divided into separate leaflets – or compound leaves – of which he distinguished a mere 18 types), all with their appropriate terminology. For ...”

“... In this respect the glorious Windows of Delaunay reflects on picturing in a way that rivals any self-aware painting by Velázquez or Vermeer. Robert Delaunay, ‘Windows’ (1912). So if ‘the demise of painting in its traditional form’ was not total, what about the ‘opening to the practices of the century to come’? Inventing Abstraction ...”

“... problem has to do with Binet’s fastidious approach to his story, though it turns out that his self-questioning method is also part of the reason for his success. His subject matter unavoidably raises the question of how we may speak about unspeakable atrocity. The mind can’t easily process the sheer number of those killed in the course of the Second ...”