“... expects better treatment, a situation that makes it impossible for anyone to develop autonomy or self-esteem. Later, when Ginzburg took the unusual step of asking her own sons to be early readers and critics of what she was writing, she noticed that her eldest would always take pleasure in insulting her work. ‘I think insulting me is one of the pleasures ...”

“... women but a problem ‘about’ women. Women are under-confident; they don’t step up; they lack self-belief. The female reviewers of the Irish Times clearly did step up, reviewing both men and other women, so just for a moment I would like to stop saying, ‘the problem with women is …’ and start looking in another direction. Affinity is a joyful ...”

“... was head of state for seven months between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma – is hosting a feast of self-enrichment, ‘tenderpreneurship’ and peculation. Johnson is thoroughly uncontroversial when he points out that the result is a hard-core elite cordoned off from reality in gated fiefdoms where they dispense patronage and create jobs for a retinue of ...”

“... way that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to be. I was riding high on sex and self-esteem – it was my time, my belle époque – but all the while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames around a photograph, something seen out of the corner of the eye.’ A novel published in 1988 that celebrated erotic adventures between men was ...”

“... a judgement on black radicalism, ‘we imitate the images of ourselves’ catches the histrionic self-construction of the tragic revenger.What happens when the slave trade is represented from the point of view of those more like Christiana than Cambridge? There’s no reduction in tragic intensity, with exploitation becoming invasive and payback necessarily ...”

“... to dispensing advice. (Himself the giver of so much advice, he seems to have entered the ranks of self-help books, or American wisdom literature: see, for example, Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties.) The sage Tolstoy, while admitting Andreas-Salomé to his circle, had unforgettably snubbed him. Rodin humbled him with his all-too visible, massive, unfussy ...”

“... drug, LSD. (In 1951 he had asked Harold Abramson, a physician on his team, to supervise him in a self-experiment with the drug. Gottlieb reported ‘an out-of-bodyness … a sense of well-being and euphoria’.) Some of his colleagues were interested in the potential effects of dispersing it on the battlefield, but Gottlieb believed LSD was the drug most ...”

“... Hegelian view of history or the abstract time of capital: the disruptive time of revolution, a ‘self-regulated time of human emancipation and agency’. It is surprising not to find this Marx – one whose view of revolutionary time more closely resembled Robinson’s own – in Black Marxism.In the early 1930s, the Great Depression and the emergence of ...”

“... back to protectionism.The rapidity of technological progress also occasionally undermined British self-confidence about its invulnerability to French military power. The Crimean War made it clear that, despite the Waterloo myth, Britain wasn’t very good at fighting. By January 1855, France had four times as many soldiers in the field. They were also better ...”

“... However popular it may have been with suburban, black-polo-neck-wearing enragés like my younger self, That Was the Week That Was soon became too much even for the liberal director general, Hugh Carleton Greene; tired of fielding endless complaints, he concluded that it was, after all, possible to be a bit too iconoclastic and he cancelled it after two ...”

“... metropolis, meanwhile, loses its modernist allure once it becomes a space for rent extraction and self-ghettoisation by the super-rich. Such cities are, Savage writes, ‘predictable, ordered, lucrative – and also highly policed and surveilled’.One conventional distinction between the social sciences and the humanities is that the humanities explore ...”

“... a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self. I became a revisionist, luckily, just as the word was coming into vogue; it was a term of abuse used about historians who were peddling anti-nationalist views of Irish history. The most seriously revisionist text, however, to appear in those years was John ...”

“... history. For example, the collection of papers edited by Peter Burke and Roy Porter, Language, Self and Society. This, you’d think (I thought), is just what is needed to excite a fresh interest in the history of English. Well, I thought wrong. The volume is too miscellaneous in topic and treatment to fulfil the claims of its subtitle, and the more ...”

“... in the novel. At Schlossburg, Henri Mensonge, scheduled to speak on the totally deconstructed self, fails to arrive: Bradbury loves a donnish joke. It all winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of ...”

“... literature as practised by Flaubert are both equally relaxed. Sand can’t understand the terrible self-denial of his literary creed. ‘You’re keeping an exuberant nature shut up in jail!’ she writes to him. Flaubert for his part restates it as an absolute: ‘I feel an unconquerable aversion to putting anything of my heart on paper. I even think that a ...”