“... is no conclusive evidence either way, never went to bed with anyone and who, like some puritan and self-punishing Odysseus binding himself to the mast, chose to make his chief subject-matter the nude male body – which he rendered sometimes piteous and always impressive but never beguiling. Honourably, Dr Liebert avoids reductionism, and he confesses that ...”

“... stages becomes, on a rising scale, a form, not only of production, but of destruction and self-destruction. It is true that the major phase of this long history has been the specific combination of capitalist drives for profit and ever more powerful technologies of transformation. But this cannot reduce the argument to one against the property forms ...”

“... Or (as F.M.L. Thompson suggests) were the relationships and interactions less positive, less self-aware? The Victorian countryside did hang together: this book does not, or rather does not explain how it did. This is not a tidy conclusion, but then the Victorian countryside is not a tidy subject. As with most worlds we have lost, its rediscovery is a ...”

“... feature now of some collective nostalgia – is not confined to the Left Bank. The largest of the self-styled cafés littéraires used to be on the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, where every customer who spent a certain amount of money was entitled to choose a book from among a long list of authors; and in the period covered by Mr Lottman, people might have ...”

“... grateful for the reason and the subtlety. They are not qualities that abound, and the price of a self-regard as high as Vidal’s must be a temptation to see all your wisecracks as ...”

“... the artist experiments with the human frame as the most flexible, ductile, indefatigably protean self-deforming system in nature. This is art history at its best, a truly humanistic activity, since it helps to give man back to himself and his possibilities, both by pointing out what lay before our eyes but which we had missed seeing for so long, and by its ...”

“... is not that they were uninterested: it is that they believed the explanations for the changes were self-evident. Since the 17th century, medical thought has been dominated by the concept of the body as a machine whose protection from disease and its effects depends primarily on internal intervention. The modern improvement in health was assumed to be due to ...”

“... The destruction of the Times by the unions is no aberration, not a case-study in unenlightened self-interest, not at all: the NGA behaved perfectly rationally in putting its craft future above the survival of the Times; the chapels behaved equally rationally in clinging to their power and upholding their highly lucrative restrictive practices. The casual ...”

“... limited intelligence leads him to suppose is right. His awareness of the nobility of Antigone’s self-sacrifice does not blind him to her obstinacy and hardness – natural, as the Chorus point out, in a daughter of Oedipus.The Oedipus of the Tyrannus seems to Winnington-Ingram to stand somewhat apart from the other heroic figures, because of his exceptional ...”

“... tutorials: on the passage to India. Carpenter went to the East in 1890, to peel off his outer self, and effectively ended his English political career. He came back to the world of anti-vivisection, of the Fellowship of the New Life, and to the rise of the Uranians. Employing sexual typologies from German sources, and also using a Lamarckian notion of ...”

“... of Eleanor Farjeon’s Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years there is actually little danger, for her self-effacing tone, though pointedly, is not disruptively so; her story, especially towards the end, becomes a vehicle for Thomas’s letters, and it is in fact from these that Motion quotes. Helen Thomas’s books – As it was, World without End and Time and ...”

“... of which astronomy is a very good example, justifies itself to its paymasters in essentially self-imposed terms. Technical spin-offs are mentioned, but the pursuit of pure knowledge is obviously an activity worth supporting, and comets certainly do not figure large on a map increasingly dominated by the visually unexciting but theoretically compelling ...”

“... the folly of publishers who send out such ropey review copies, the whole business is commercially self-defeating because Redfern’s panoramas are clearly intended to be the prime selling point of the publication (or does the Sagan introduction signal a failure of nerve up at ‘command level’ somewhere?). Much of the rest of both text and illustrations can ...”

“... housewife was at that period, a seeming capitalist but without capital. I suspect it was his own self-employed homeworker status that misled Shaw into thinking that copyright was a species of property in economic reality as well as by legal fiction, and into supposing that artistic creators are to be analysed as capitalists, collecting royalties on their ...”

“... the closest links with the Trade Union movement. This party, a rump of its former Parliamentary self, would recognise that the prospect of achieving its ends through Parliamentary means was virtually non-existent. It would be driven to attempt to organise acts of political irresponsibility and to seek to use its traditional ties with the Trade Union ...”