“... that Law himself is responsible. It’s also possible that the virus is a spontaneous flaw in the self-regenerating code. The first to fall victim are those on the international dateline, before the contamination spreads steadily westward as the earth spins into it. The process is nicely described: It begins in small ways, in the smallest hours, when there ...”

“... The problem​ with being a dedicated social trouble-maker who has not self-destructed is that, as the decades roll by, the society you wish to irritate gets used to you and even begins to regard you with a certain affection. Eventually, you become a beloved puppy that is always forgiven for soiling the carpet. No matter what taboos you kick out at, people just smile and shake their head ...”

“... punishments were for the most part corporal. Far more than ours, this was a tactile society, and self-consciously so in that it was increasingly suspicious of spiritual and immaterial entities. The words ‘embodied’ and ‘corporeal’ were newly invented to identify those qualities that can be experienced by touch – by the end of the century these were ...”

“... of such forces and resources as he had at his disposal. He distrusted the departmental self-interest of professional civil servants, and in any case they took too long to do things. The Prof and his team of young economists and statisticians had powers to override departmental norms, to extract instantly the information they wanted, and – which ...”

“... to lay down general rules which then acquired almost divine force. The boycott organisers insisted self-righteously that they were not using the boycott for party-political ends: they wanted sporting merit, not race, to count. ‘When people branded me as a Communist puppet, I stayed focused on apartheid in sport,’ Sam Ramsamy, boss of the National Olympic ...”

“... and realism, that makes musicals so American, and so gay. He regrets that musicals, in their self-importance, have tried to take on the great themes and dramatic consistency of ‘straight’ drama, whereas drama has shown little interest in taking on the more fluid structure of the musical. The gay content and gay participation in musicals is a barrier ...”

“... of the reality normally required by biographers is known; and given the value of the myth for the self-validation of the England reborn in the Reformation. This is how Foxe introduced Wyclif: ‘Thus, in these so great and troublous times and horrible darkness of ignorance, what time there seemed in a manner to be no one so little spark of pure doctrine left ...”

“... her husband became an icon of the New Woman. Ibsen’s use of such subjects riled censors and self-appointed moralists, but they don’t explain the enduring power of his plays, or how he came to invent an entirely new form of drama. Twentieth-century Modernists and their followers often dismiss Ibsen’s plays as so many stodgy living-rooms stuffed with ...”

“... but few of them succeeded. Centuries ago, Descartes suggested, plausibly, that the attempt is self-defeating. There is, I should add, another way to respond to the hard problem. One might hold that the world isn’t made entirely of matter after all; there is also a fundamentally different kind of stuff – mind-stuff, call it – and consciousness ...”

“... the sense of not being able to grasp true religious experience’. Oswald’s poetry is much less self-aware and, thinking itself capable of this giant ‘grasp’, sometimes drifts into a hollow theism. Poems in which God is name-dropped from nowhere seem like empty icons: shimmering slightly, but with a wooden dullness behind the eyes. There is a poem ...”

“... for economic transformation, and Todd comes up with an unexpected explanation for their canny and self-interested behaviour. When we imagine a typical interwar worker, it isn’t as a bob-haired 14-year-old shop assistant wearing her first pair of heels. Contemporary commentators and officials didn’t notice such workers either: Orwell thought them ...”

“... himself is a king who is distracted from the serious business of just rule into luxurious self-indulgence by figures such as Fancy, Cloaked Collusion and Courtly Abusion; downfall and despair follow, until he is narrowly rescued from suicide by Good Hope, Redress and Sad Circumspection. The play belongs with the medieval tradition of direct ...”

“... to take seriously. If Shteyngart were serious about Misha, he would make the poor slob pay for his self-absorption. He cannot do this, in part because he cannot see far enough past his own jokes to work out whether Misha is the vehicle or the target of the satire. Is Misha the cynic who can deftly satirise the Holocaust in a grant proposal, or the gullible ...”

“... unrelated figures who didn’t write anything at all about his op-ed. I found all this tiresome, self-indulgent and more than a little embarrassing. Still, there must be many more for whom Goldberg’s obsessive return to his own humiliation is compelling, one of the reasons the book has moved up the bestseller charts so briskly. No matter how much power its ...”

“... What emerged was everybody’s idea of a certain kind of windy politician. Disraeli, an expert in self-fashioning, said that England, subject to fogs and a large middle class, required grave statesmen. But Kinnock was not a grave statesman. Indeed, that is one of his more attractive features. At the time, however, his seeming to be neither witty nor grave ...”