“... an apparatus for imagining, the I Ching facilitates a confrontation between a presentday self and an ancient, randomly chosen Other, bringing a personal question, full of hope, fear and ignorance, face to face with the enigmatic, poetically dense, open-ended interpretation of an abstract hexagram. The notion that something new, interesting and ...”

“... Bouncing through McAleer’s book are also puns that would be turned down by most self-respecting Christmas crackers. Our author is, to put it simply, a bit of a clown. The publishers refer to his ‘personal voice’, but there are really two voices, and the reader is never quite sure which McAleer will turn up. There is the dandified one who ...”

“... the Frankfurt refugees retreated into ‘deeper isolation’; they suffered from ‘intellectual self-doubt, escapism and élitism’. ‘A lack of interest on the part of the Institute’s core group in becoming integrated’ explains their ‘shattered lives’, writes Krohn, alluding to the subtitle of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Even The Authoritarian ...”

“... Great Gatsby, may be ‘an unbroken series of successful gestures’. It’s a wrong-headed and self-punishing proposition. Both Gatsby and The Last Tycoon are novels which dream of such a personality, but they tell us finally, as Fitzgerald’s life does, that personality can be made of failure too, that a broken series of anything like successful gestures ...”

“... and blaming others. Even the massacre at Chumi Shengo seems not to have occasioned any direct self-questioning. Instead, as he was leaving Lhasa to return to India, Younghusband had an intense mystical experience, clearly purificatory in nature, in which he was seized by a tremendous ‘sense of elation and goodwill’, and knew with absolute certainty ...”

“... get off the ground, had become an astonishing compulsion; nowhere more so than in France, the self-styled nursery of flight. In the year of Blériot the Count de Lambert flew over Paris and circled the Eiffel Tower at 300 metres. If King Kong had climbed the Tower Parisians could not have been more excited. It is true that Santos-Dumont had done the same ...”

“... scholarship and early anthropology. But all professions are jealous. As the IMS became more self-confident and hidebound, it fretted over the way in which the Company’s Indian soldiers and even deathly-ill Europeans continued to put themselves in the hands of Indian practitioners when in direst need. This, said one doctor, ‘can only throw undeserved ...”

“... capitalism save to overthrow it. There was no point in being a ‘currency crank’, as Strachey self-deprecatingly dubbed the author of Revolution by Reason. Between 1932 and 1938 he wrote five books which captured both the excitement and flexibility of the Marxist account. Strachey’s supreme quality was his clear prose style: there was no frill or swank ...”

“... all come out and it is time for me to begin that journey which will be simultaneously a voyage of self-discovery and an investigation of the state of England. I take the tube to Camden Town and from there walk over to the central avenue which runs along the edge of the Zoo. Nervous about venturing on strange territory, I consult the notice-board which ...”

“... Nor is this hunger for ‘media exposure’ (as the spin doctors would call it) entirely due to self-love on the part of individual peers. For the thing that must eventually strike all visitors to the House of Lords is the obsession of its members, whether Labour or Tory, hereditary aristocrats or proletarian life peers, with the survival of the place in ...”

“... is not a liberal man. His present pessimism is, one suspects, the disillusionment of someone whose self-promoted wisdom is foolishly no longer heeded by those in charge. The only role left to him is that of the reactionary Jeremiah. I spent most of Thursday morning listening to the radio, waiting for the British Government’s formal response to the IRA ...”

“... without attempting to provide a rationale for republican government. This was not, then, a self-conscious, nation-building revolution like the American and French ones that followed. Again with reverberations in our time, the northern Netherlands was an asylum land, taking in many and diverse immigrants – among them, the rush of refugees who came ...”

“... His strange appeal for the reader perhaps lies in things which also make Jorrocks oddly appealing: self-reliance, intense and simple emotions, a capacity for commitment, dignity despite being ignoble. Norman Gash refers to The Mayor of Casterbridge when he is describing the career of a footman called Luff, who rose to be mayor of Blandford. Such things did ...”

“... own land, but only have the right to ‘use and improve’ it. With every household sized for self-sufficiency, Wright reasoned, there could be no proletariat. Nor would every resident be condemned to agricultural labour. The project would also include the spectacularly capitalistic ‘Mile-High Illinois’ skyscraper, with 528 storeys, out-rigged ...”

“... communes, comes across as a highly practical man, more pragmatic and less inclined to anguished self-examination than many of the Tolstoyans. Hand-farming, for example, went a bit too far for Mazurin. His practical qualities kept the two communes afloat and no doubt had something to do with his survival after 1936. Yet even Mazurin had his spiritual ...”