“... of that Fall. How else can one provide any rational view of the sum of massacres, torture, folly, self-destruction, which make up the works and days of humanity? How else can one even hope to grasp why it should be that scientific and technological progress, economic expansion, intellectual and artistic invention, have not only left mankind unenfranchised ...”

“... young man with whom Cheever had an affair at the end of his life, makes it sound like a comedy of self-delusion. ‘Have you ever had a homosexual experience?’ Susan Cheever asked her father, in an interview which was published by Newsweek. ‘My answer to that is, well, I have had many, Susie, and all between the ages of nine and eleven,’ Cheever ...”

“... blackballings were, of course, the result of the author’s temerity in another sphere: that of self-appointed rectifier of miscarriages in the courts. Many readers will turn to this book in an effort to discover what motivated a man born into the Establishment to rock the judicial ark, a role which hardly seems to square with his breezy, sanguine public ...”

“... from the time, about 1800, when a national idea dawned. There is a parallel in the process of self-hypnotism by which the Muslims of India tried to turn themselves into a nation. In Israel, unlike Pakistan, there has been much history-writing, whose quality it may be too early to estimate. The political outcome, however, is not presented here as one ...”

“... is here, by costume and cuisine and clientèle: the calorific content of democracy, peace and self-confidence translated into avoirdupois, a Caesar-like contempt as vision, an audible sigh for risk! Energy turns to mass, ‘webs’ to ‘padded’ to ‘stuffed’, minceur to Bonn femme. At the same time, though, there is a sinister military rumble under ...”

“... dollars to his weekly wage but, at the same time, demanded the sort of manic energy and systematic self-disavowal Thompson could only acquire through heavy boozing. As a result, he began suffering frequent collapses from alcohol poisoning and ‘nervous exhaustion’. These breakdowns were to continue until the end of his frantically unhealthy life. Like his ...”

“... novel, The Valiant, in 1969. These cousins are ragged, elderly scamps, weirdly dressed, full of self-importance, and addicted to circumlocutions they themselves obviously find hilarious. ‘With the help of the tutelary goddess, I have obtained an electrical coupling of the apparatus which transmits the human voice, with the corresponding apparatus inside ...”

“... came to be seen as embodied in order to possess that particularity. As Bynum puts it, ‘what self is (including what body is) will be packed into soul; body will be the expression of that soul in matter.’ This principle departs radically from early Christian dualist lamentations (tinged with Gnosticism as well as classical disgust for the flesh) over ...”

“... that Afrocentrists are purely concerned with the ‘feel-good’ factor and with boosting the low self-esteem of African-Americans. Although she has some respect for this motive, she denies it has any place in the writing and teaching of history, which she maintains must always remain objective. Thus, she has felt obliged to stand up and be counted against ...”

“... or even the small social niceties which oil everyone’s wheels. He is surprisingly low in self-confidence, which may be one reason he sets so much store by the trappings of authority. He is also genuinely interested in the big issues, and more concerned about them than he is with the usual who’s-up, who’s-down chit-chat which dominates the bars ...”

“... in the Daily Express, of all places, but the Mail on Sunday last September ranted that ‘the same self-destructiveness and sheer bloody-mindedness which reduced Britain – victors of the Second World War – to industrial inferiors of Germany and Japan have been strutting the waterfront like peacocks.’ If you believed the Mail on Sunday, you might not want ...”

“... in it either. Eisenman does not hide from the racist contradictions and the lecherous paedophilic self-deceptions that abound in Gauguin. What he explores more sensitively than most is Gauguin’s relativising experiences on his beach. These began in the very first moments of Gauguin’s arrival in Tahiti. Costume was always important to him. It was his ...”

“... while it had divided the country, also provided a context in which a modern movement of national self-assertion could emerge. In the decades leading up to World War Two various factions had competed for influence: the established monarchy in Hue, based on an adapted mandarin system, was challenged by nationalist forces, in which the Communists and various ...”

“... bed of public and private patronage has cushioned him against disaster, and he doesn’t have the self-knowledge to realise that the impostor is ...”

“... professing his guilt. In his letters to Bowers he presents himself – with what degree of self-consciousness it’s impossible to tell – as a standard-issue Hollywood psychopath. ‘In a perfect world,’ he writes, ‘an artist like you – a creator of beauty – should never have to come in contact with such an ugliness as me.’ In a letter to ...”