“... threatens to take secret charge of the scene. The female should have no consciousness – no self-consciousness. Consciousness, like sexuality itself, should be awakened by the lover, that fairy prince whose kiss will at last startle the gratified mind into something like thought. In creating ‘modesty’ as a value, social engineers of the late 17th ...”

“... and the great guard-lantern sputters And the horror of our fall is written plain, Every secret, self-revealing on the aching whitewashed ceiling. Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain? Allan Young, in his scholarly study of the ‘invention’ of PTSD, would disagree with the notion that it has always been with us, arguing that ‘the traumatic ...”

“... stems from sanitary inspectors, settlement workers, lady visitors and other philanthropists whose self-appointed mission to darkest London was to help the poor to become clean and decent, regular and respectable, and who, for that reason, saw them as unkempt, ungodly and unwashed, recklessly filling the world with screaming brats destined to turn into ...”

“... wonderful teacher (which he was not: in the classroom as elsewhere he was discursive, reckless and self-obsessed) and a reformer (which he wasn’t either). He was sycophantic enough to his superiors to survive for a long time at Eton. Even his increasing dependence on alcohol could have been overlooked in an environment where drunkenness was generally ...”

“... could write like angels. Norman Lewis writes like an angel too, but one who has substituted self-effacement for the appearance of innocence. The World, the World is a travelling autobiography which begins with an encounter in an Italian railway carriage almost worthy of Buchan himself. ‘A breathless young Englishman’ flops into the dining-car seat ...”

“... because he is the more modern figure as because he is the more Post-Modern, adept at the art of self-invention and reinvention. He was a better political actor than most of his rivals in Parliament because, while they thought they were in a glorified gentleman’s club or a glorified philanthropic meeting, he realised that they were on a stage. And he ...”

“... screwed up as his brother Ward, the titular ‘paperboy’, star reporter on the Miami Times. Jack self-destructs in his first year at the University of Florida, returning in shame to the narcotic routines of his father’s home in North Florida, driving a delivery truck for the Moat County Tribune, his father’s newspaper. Ward, too, disappears into his ...”

“... a Muslim’, shouts Chad. ‘We are people who say one important thing – that pleasure and self-absorption isn’t everything.’ In ‘Eight Arms to Hold You’, a piece published with the screenplay of Kureishi’s film, London Kills Me, the power of pop music is asserted by contrasting the voice of John Lennon (‘It is aggressive and combative but ...”

“... but nowhere in the book does he explore, let alone dismantle, Foucault’s telling but ultimately self-destructive rhetorical trope. Literary specialists may therefore be disappointed. Historians and philosophers will be much better pleased.General readers (if they still exist) may marvel yet again at the public interest aroused in France by essentially ...”

“... another inner part – a shrewd ironic part – knows that such yearning springs from sentimental self-delusion. So why pretend? Observers are what they are, not participants, and the wise ones don’t try to fool themselves or others about it. As Millman comments early in his book, travel is a ‘quick Fix’: ‘It entitles you to meet interesting people ...”

“... govern the world. On this point physicists tend to argue vaguely that the correct laws will be self-evident by their simplicity or mathematical elegance, but one can then ask who decided that the laws of physics ought to be beautiful as well as correct: God, or the physicists? What Hawking really thinks of all this is left for the reader to guess at. White ...”

“... Auden to realise that the sense of things coming to an end was what this generation, for all their self-conscious newness, began with. But in their work das Ende had an entirely different emphasis from the visions of a dying culture in The Waste Land and Ulysses. For if we saw in these works witness of the decline of civilisation, we also saw them as ...”

“... war to the knife by the interposition of the Great Wall had already become a ghost of its former self. Since then (as Thomas Haining’s additional notes to his translation make clear), Arthur Waldron’s research has revealed that the sporadic use of fortifications by the Chinese from ancient to Early Modern times was never sufficient to justify the myth of ...”

“... over-sexed harridan. Not surprisingly, he much admires Ronald Reagan, who restored ‘the will and self-confidence of the American people’ and launched ‘decisive and masterful’ initiatives like the Star Wars anti-missile defence programme that was supposed to surround the country with the equivalent of a bullet-proof vest. True, his Administration ...”

“... regrettably hacked-back article in the Observer in 1996. Curtis’s digging was news even by the self-referential standards of the gated media village. In 1990, Kathy Kadane, an American agency journalist, made her name when she revealed that in 1965 CIA officers had passed death sentences on five thousand members of the Indonesian Communist Party, the ...”