“... broader philosophical and political purposes it will hardly do to appeal to women’s discourse or self-consciousness. Yet various papers both in Women and Moral Theory and in Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy (an entirely British volume published in the US) urge us to start our thinking by considering women’s point of view. No doubt women’s experience ...”

“... Without it, my pursuit – and the steadiness, patience, seclusion, regularity, hard work, and self-concentration, it demands – would be utterly worthless to me. I should die at the oar, and could die a more contemptible and worthless death in no man’s eyes than my ...”

“... sandwiches and minks. In too many other respects, though, she really is liberated from her former self. She has a son called Gregory, whose upbringing is dealt with as briskly as her marriage was, and it is only when he starts building model aeroplanes (not very well) that we are asked to take much interest in him. The focus at this stage is on the altered ...”

“... pursue the same career, that of literature. Up writing at four or five, the father endures a self-punishing regime and refuses to involve his family in his ‘creations’ (children, as he thinks of them) except when indulging his monstrous ego. Once you offered me your clippings file – the human touch! What next: a translator’s essays, a printed ...”

“... may be even now discussing them; and however engrossing, such a mutuality is both dangerous and self-limiting. True gossip should not only offer a state of perfect relaxation but of perfect ignorance as well, with only imagination to do the work. At which point what should fall into one’s lap but the most perfect gossip book imaginable: perfect, that is ...”

“... violence, it had become obvious that Israel was losing its composure along with much of its self-confidence, despite its military might. Israelis looked around them and saw that thousands of tanks and hundreds of planes were not enough to ensure their safety; that even non-conventional weapons could not solve a security problem that had seemed marginal ...”

“... then, a confirmation of the modern theorist’s approach to poetry: that all texts are equal, self-referential, and that it is what the critic makes of them that really matters? I don’t believe it is. I share Davie’s rejection of that view, which presents itself as a revolt against the authority of the academic establishment but is in fact the ...”

“... found himself refraining from violence even at the point where he argues for the erasure of the self, then that, too, has to be of central significance. ‘Wherever football is played, the name Manchester United is honoured,’ Eamon Dunphy writes in A Strange Kind of Glory. It’s an odd thing to say, given that Manchester United have for quite a long time ...”

“... I still scream with laughter every time I think about it. Is it the spectacle of Bly’s immediate self-defeat? Or is it because the title itself so firmly establishes the cultural impossibility of taking Iron John straight? Anyway, here’s the difficulty: iron is rhyming slang for ‘male homosexual’. Just as ginger (ginger beer) means ...”

“... of white men. Every lie spoken by a white person is shredded, every white cruelty recounted, every self-serving rationalisation exposed. This is the book’s great strength, and its greatest weakness, too, for Mr Sparks is so intent upon demonising the apartheid state and demolishing its myths that he comes close to erecting a new edifice of myth in their ...”

“... relatively brief importance as a centre of big manufacture was ending, and when its democratic self-government had been abolished in a single monstrous stroke of political malevolence. Coupled with the traditional over-centralisation of British government, now suddenly accelerated by the Thatcher regime’s systematic destruction of local authority, it ...”

“... and his frequent journeys to Italy (often on a BBC commission). But in his last decade, drink and self-neglect (his staple diet was Complan) increasingly undermined his always fragile health. His notebooks record a continuing and courageous struggle. On 10 March 1985 he notes: ‘After the horrors and the reliefs of the last terrible weeks I have ...”

“... round the clock so far as I could see, a wonderful cheerfulness, equanimity and absence of self-pity. When I first met him on the Evening Standard, he usually walked around the office with a stick, making it seem like some intricate, elegant dance. Indeed, if I remember aright, he had taken the floor at his own wedding. But then, one day he was in a ...”

“... and learned from. The Carlylean hero of the picture is a youthful navvy, wielding a shovel with self-assured pride. Other emblems of work don’t look quite so dignified. A well-to-do couple on horseback are (the lesson can’t be missed) seen in deep shade, demoted to the background of the picture, their way barred by the crowded diggings. A young lady ...”

“... One gets the feeling that he wanted to appear a fraud or a clown, and that the need sprang from self-criticism, bitter and appeasable only by scrupulous attention to the requirements of honourable behaviour, demands usually met in secret and dissimulated in public. Yeats admired and disliked him, admitting that he ‘could not fathom’ Shaw’s ...”