“... Eily’s boyfriend Stephen recalls being off his head in Archway and hallucinating his younger self in the street: ‘That boy, looking beat to shit. After a couple of hours God began to explain. Remember this? Yourself?’ (God lapses into silence when he decides to jump off a roof.) In The City Changes Its Face, which continues the story of Eily and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... astonishingly prolific and conversationally predatory Fuller was well known even among America’s self-examining Transcendentalists for what her closest ally in the movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called her ‘mountainous me’. Before she left the United States when she was 36 for a tour of England and the Continent, where she would seek out ...”

“... As for so many generations of radicals, politics was their open university, their route to ‘self-development’. Annie Kenney, a mill-girl from Oldham who was more or less adopted by Emmeline Pankhurst, remembered recruiting for the WSPU in Pennine moorland and villages where women were ‘versed in Labour politics’: ‘The lamp would be burning, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... increased antisemitism and an exodus of Israel’s educated elite. The Israeli state performs its self-defeating operations under the sign of Jewish ‘safety’, and for that reason with the widespread approval of Jews in Israel and much of the global diaspora. Denials of the reality of genocide mask a deeper, libidinal investment in its perpetration. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”