“... any of these wonderful scholars think what this meant to me, having a son who didn’t have enough self-respect to feel himself a man? You had such a craze for animals, but may I remind you, when you were staying with Ottla at Zürau you wouldn’t even undress in front of the cat she’d brought in to get rid of the mice ... Yet you imagined a dragon coming ...”

“... columnists and television reporters, CNN above all – are participating in a unique form self-delusion. For the ‘peace process’ is being depicted as something mystical, almost holy, a shaft of light in a darkening world that will unite Muslim, Jew and Christian, a transfiguration in which the Arabs suddenly decided through some form of divine ...”

“... made it clear that he wanted to lead a country in which no one felt excluded, not even the self-exclusionists of Orania. At this symbolic level nation-building has known its greatest success. The transformation of institutions has made a more qualified start: it has gone well in the Army, has resulted in the loss of almost all the SAAF’s pilots, and ...”

“... nation-state had started to turn itself into something else. It was now ready to abandon as self-defeating the attempt to provide for the welfare of all its citizens, and instead sought to found its legitimacy on its ability to maximise their opportunities, and to offer them the basic security within which to make those opportunities count. It was ...”

“... on nature had given way to an uneasy hush, which was then followed by a frenzy of alarms and self-recriminations as Homo sapiens, the bad steward, ran riot through the estate. In wealthier parts of the world, the perils of Nature (and work) are no longer what they were, so it’s difficult to grasp that in earlier readings of Moby-Dick, the Nantucket ...”

“... in a fit of drunken despair, for example – as credible and powerful as the smaller pieces of self-delusion and social comedy. ‘It is also a book about a woman,’ Moore wrote to his publisher, ‘presenting certain problems of living peculiar to women. I wrote it with all the sympathy and understanding that I am capable of.’ Moore clearly knew that ...”

“... one? There are many ways in which the imagination creates and imparts knowledge. Is this claim self-evident, or just untrue – untrue because the imagination, whatever its wonders and virtues, doesn’t deal in knowledge in any but the weakest, least demanding sense? There are all kinds of good things which are not knowledge, and we should not betray them ...”

“... by Nancy Crampton on the jacket of his new novel, Everyman, is as stern and ungiving as a self-portrait by Rembrandt. 30 May, Yorkshire. Not one in fifty people knows how to restore or convert a house. A familiar fault round here is to strip off the stucco to reveal the supposed beauty of the stonework, which is often not beautiful at all and ...”

“... to evidence and basic logic (resistance can only result from ignorance, speciesist prejudice and self-interest). But it seems odd for him to say, as he does towards the end of the book, that the claims of Animal Liberation Now ‘at no point … require acceptance of utilitarianism’. His arguments often look like utilitarian arguments; they are certainly ...”

“... all connections to American folk music’ – read jazz and rock and roll – ‘and instead self-consciously modelled itself on European serial models’. Janáček, as he saw it, offered a vital alternative path. Reich has repeatedly explored the musically expressive qualities of human speech in terms Janáček would have understood, if not ...”

“... including on Kashmir: an outline for a deal based on demilitarisation, open borders and a form of self-government or autonomy that would unite the divided territory. The Pakistani army attempted to defuse tensions along the Line of Control, closing militant training camps and co-ordinating security with the Indian army. The process collapsed partly because of ...”

“... borne outwards on a wave of overseas settlement, and then empire. At a deep level, their self-identity came to mean more than just ‘Englishness’ in a 20th-century or ‘ethnic’ sense. ‘Britishness’ in fact was an important feature of the resultant (and still prevalent) alibi-identity – not being like others, above that sort of thing ...”

“... the ‘solitude and sufferings’ of the Eikon’s title page? Is this why he wallowed in self-pity and spent himself in flirtations and illicit liaisons? Was he relieved to be free of the cares of government or was he desperate to regain his rightful inheritance? Should that day ever come, would he obey his father’s prayer on the scaffold to ...”

“... between eerie fragility and just enough decisiveness – insect lightness contending with a half-self-mocking monumentality – was never struck ...”

“... I couldn’t see an end to it all. These things were understandable even if my resolute lack of self-control was not. ‘No stickability, my girl,’ my father would say, warning me of trouble to come. More worrying, because mysterious, in my handiwork life was the way nothing I cut or measured, no matter how carefully, ever came out the right size. In ...”