“... letters home from a very bright pupil at a very philosophical school, perhaps – and not the self-congratulatory musings of late career. Certainly it does not torment him, as it did Nietzsche’s ripe sage, that ‘he cannot be the last thinker.’ The sense is present all the time that philosophy and other creative activities continue, that nothing will ...”

“... sons from war. Further to the west, Slovene and Croatian populations are being mobilised into self-defence units. Many young Slovenes and Croatians are dying – together with young army conscripts from all parts of the country. And all the time the supposed Yugoslav capital remains calm. The military may have taken charge of the country’s politics, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a very different aesthetic from Calvino’s – in a belief, as one character puts it, ‘that the self is rooted in nostalgia and reverie, and that they are the fountains of Art’ – but no less brilliant in its ability to draw the reader into peculiarly imagined worlds. Just as Calvino’s story ‘The Name, the Nose’ exists under the shadow of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the frenetic battle to shore up the grossly over-extended News Corp edifice when the self-same bankers were confronted by the world recession and wanted their money back. If Shawcross is to be believed, the battle was won by a whisker. But Murdoch nevertheless remains saddled with vast debt repayments which must be completed by February ...”

“... ethnicity, about tolerance and vulnerability, about chains of command, about popular languages of self-respect and identity. Marpingen offers in microcosm an image of the political forces at work in a developing nationalist state. Blackbourn tackles his Marpingers from every angle: personal, demographic, social, political, economic. Though not quite a ...”