“... catalogue of misery and violence. If this was empathy it was subordinate to a powerful overflow of self-pity, and present when I was at my most incapable. So one shouldn’t sentimentalise it: empathy that derives from the chronic impotence of depression doesn’t add up to much. Later, when I’d more or less recovered, I was, like most ...”

“... on the other hand I don’t. There are so many factors engaging our attention! Even as present self and poem give up pride of place to an earlier self and an earlier poem, neither self nor poem seems certain: And this is not as good a poem as The Circus And I wonder if any good will ...”

“... international law, or have a habit of complying with it . . . but simply that states act out of self-interest.’ This assumes that states can and do act rationally, and that in exercising rational choices the values they apply are consistent with those of Goldsmith and Posner. Practice suggests otherwise. The authors’ claim is difficult to sustain even ...”

“... Marathi and then Hindu identity, changed Bombay seemingly for good, taking away its cosmopolitan self-image. It was at this time that the ‘maximum city’ – burgeoning, and in the process pulling down the barriers that had kept the middle-class employee and the entrepreneur on the make, governance and criminality, politics and religion, in distinct ...”

“... books follow a kind of ideal of impersonal high-powered scholarship – because it is this very un-self-questioning trust in ‘impersonality’ that proves most self-limiting, least flexible in practice. Perhaps no scholarly essay is safely embarked on without some belief in the indeterminacy principle, or the fact that a ...”

“... Lipton is temperamentally unsuited to dealing with the French bureaucracy. In a solitary flash of self-irony she describes herself arriving at an office ‘about as serene as I can get’. Still, her generally het-up condition adds to the drama of the hunt, and so does the presence of Meurent by her side. Olympia takes her hand and speaks to her in paragraphs ...”

“... The self-effacing authors of this excellent book aim to contribute some clear-headedness and penetration to what ought to be our great debate, but is too often our puzzle-headed mumble, about war. So exemplary is the clarity of their rich, varied and powerful argument that their hopes may well be realised. Good books about ethics and warfare – that is, books which can meet the military and political ‘realists’ on their own grounds, without sacrificing moral principle – are not as rare as they used to be ...”

“... Like any self-respecting modern man I buy Ecover instead of Fairy Liquid. I recycle, I worry about my carbon footprint (must cut down on those Ryanair mini-breaks) and I’m about to buy my first hemp T-shirt. Global warming has got scary, industrialised agriculture makes me angry and I’m delighted to be living in a green moment, with Labour and the Tories both desperate to appear the more eco-friendly party ...”

“... mutations she left her own mark on minds and events. It is not too much to say that this strange, self-educated, self-propelled little woman deserves a place among the makers of modern India. The temptation is to draw a continuous line from the first royal charter granted by another warrior queen on the last day of ...”

“... invented by another of his great heroes, Raymond Roussel. Perec’s obsession with autistic, self-propagating literary forms of this kind, which implicitly reject all preconceptions of depth and significance, is wholly compatible with Post-Modernism’s ideal of literature as a self-reflexive surface, a field of clues ...”

“... suicides. It is likely that many of the victims also imitated the incompetence of Werther’s self-slaughter – an act worthier of the Three Stooges than of a latter-day Hamlet. The clock strikes twelve and with the forlorn cry ‘Lotte! Lotte! Farewell! Farewell!’ Goethe’s romantic hero shoots himself in the head. Six hours later a servant comes in ...”

“... values, aiming for success in conventional terms and for the most part achieving it. Low self-esteem and a dependent eagerness to please are probably the most important single characteristics. Typically a bulimarexic is anxious, lonely and a perfectionist. The Whites have an explanation – but only one: men. Fathers, husbands, brothers, lovers: once ...”

“... current political events, though his argument is spoiled when he goes on to say that Althusser’s self-criticism is a ‘commercial strategy ... marketed by the engineers of the planned obsolescence of thought’. Hobsbawm, in his chapter on ‘Marx, Engels and Politics’ in The History of Marxism, shows that the founders themselves were quite opportunistic ...”

“... the discomforts attendant on what W. Jackson Bate has termed ‘the remorseless deepening of self-consciousness before the rich and intimidating legacy of the past’ through the simple expedient of ignoring the past. What then deepens is another sort of self-consciousness, and it is sad to think of people as ...”

“... themselves to ‘my research’ than to ‘our research’. The work has largely been done by self-effacing individuals who do not appear on the volumes’ title pages but get their obscure billing in the cluttered text of the preface. Nor was their work mere catalogue drudgery. Most of the journals carried unsigned articles, and the task of cracking the ...”