“... novel The Gods Will Have Blood (1912): A young man with … a pockmarked face and an air of cold self-possession slowly mounted the tribune … Speaking in a clear voice, he delivered an eloquent, logical attack on the enemies of the Republic. He dealt forcibly [with them] by means of uncompromising and metaphysical arguments … He spoke at great ...”

“... 14th-century French mystic and poet Marguerite Porete devised a visionary ladder of meditation and self-mortification that allowed her to obliterate her selfhood in loving union with God. The idea of the transcendent power of love was perfected by Dante: Beatrice was both a real person and a miracle, the promise of salvation in the form of a beautiful ...”

“... Beach and the arms factories of Culver City.Beirut lacked Paris’s sophistication and cultural self-regard. Mount Lebanon didn’t match the Swiss Alps for grandeur, and its mixture of communities – parliamentary seats were guaranteed for each of its many Christian and Muslim denominations – was more fragile and bellicose than Switzerland’s. Yet ...”

“... the Spiritual in Art (1911), in which he argued that the spiritual was an innate form of self-expression.The ‘astral paintings’ the spirit Amaliel commissioned from af Klint in 1906 became the first in her long-running Paintings for the Temple cycle, which she planned to exhibit in a museum temple built specially to house them. Primordial Chaos ...”

“... to the responses of others near you, joining an indistinct, wobbling mass.This anchorless, subtly self-adjusting character helps explain the mechanism (though not the driving force) of ‘grade inflation’. But that concept can be deceptive. It would be wrongheaded to claim that the same work is not more highly rewarded today than it would have been in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... opinion could be turbulent, foolish and destructive, and that reason was the slave of passion and self-interest, but instead of dismissing it, he sought instead to tame it and domesticate it by a renovation of manners. History was to help house-train. Increasingly, after his early, dazzling philosophical works of the 1740s he turned his attention from a study ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... visits by the Prime Minister. I find myself thinking, it would be Liverpool, that sentimental, self-dramatising place, and am brought up short by seeing footage of a child brought out dead, women waiting blank-faced at Lime Street, and a father meeting his two sons off the train, his relief turned to anger at the sight of their smiling faces, cuffing and ...”

“... it necessary to claim that there are human beings who lack the essential capacity of reasoning and self-determination. This suggests, rightly I think, that it is because all humans have those capacities, at least to some degree, that we find it morally wrong to deprive people of the freedom to exercise them. The demands of justice are based at least in part on ...”

“... never became a good writer, since he wrote too much, too fast, on too many subjects, and without self-criticism and revision. Even at the time of his greatest influence, he was not taken very seriously as a theorist on the intellectual left, though he was, with Shaw, Wells, Marx, G.D.H. Cole and Tawney, among the authors who had had most influence on the ...”

“... concern for gentlemanly standards, that the House of Commons was ‘hardly the place for a self-respecting man’. His passion for serving on commissions, preferably royal ones, is curious, the more so because his first experience of such bodies was the one whose members were hell-bent on the retrocession of the Transvaal. This could have sickened him ...”

“... were unwilling to extend civil and political rights or to open themselves to electoral defeat. The self-deception, now, is clear. Interest rates in the North rose after the second oil-price rise in 1979, and the demand for imported food crops and other commodities began to decline. The cost of Southern countries’ debt went up, and their earnings went ...”