“... residents. It was the Comrades – young men now patrolling the war-torn streets of Soweto in self-styled citizen’s defence units – who took on the Jackrollers in June and July. Three big Jackrollers were killed in those months and shortly afterwards a vigil for one of the dead men was attacked by the Comrades with an AK47 and a shotgun. The avengers ...”

“... perhaps ‘intellectual biography’ is only tolerable or indeed practicable as autobiography, as self-excision. The history of any man’s thoughts leads to that of his past: even Descartes could not avoid his German winter quarters and his room with a stove. That past can be discarded, but a knowledge of it is as necessary to the presentation of a lively ...”

“... adds a twist: ‘teaching the cultural text requires a university aware of the history of its own self divisions.’ We need to teach not just the book, but also how we come to be teaching the book, how the teacher came to be a teacher, how the student came to be a student, how the room-cleaner who cleaned the blackboard that morning came to be neither a ...”

“... let alone to act on it.’ He is a private man, his excellence, perhaps genius, well hidden by self-containment. Vic does act on the Great World, and becomes a player in the Australian post-war mining and property boom. As he lies dying he thinks back to his childhood: He was in his own nine-year-old body again, standing barefoot in old serge pants and ...”

“... its own subversive way. This strategy of concealment allowed him to give nothing of his essential self away until he, and it, were ready. Even then, all he did, in a sense, was brood in company instead of brooding alone. His novels came out of experiences that had been not so much accumulated as obsessively hoarded. Blotner relates a story not repeated by ...”

“... than an illusion is the most bitter irony of all. Finally, nothing can be known absolutely. As his self-made priest, the barbershop ‘Minister’ of Georgetown, once told him, ‘human society was heading for a system that would strongly resemble the beehive, when the word pleasure would disappear from our vocabulary, a recent arrival anyway. Just as free ...”

“... archive to create a series of vivid snapshots, with no attempt at totality. The book was self-consciously a collection of independent essays of a provisional nature. By exploring in detail the world of one clandestine bookseller in one French town, Darnton aimed to show, for instance, how a whole arm of the literary underground operated. These ...”

“... both in 1704 and today. One sees international commerce ‘as a mutual exchange of (eminently self-interested) benefits that enhances the long-term interests of all participants and that is in its essence a true system of natural liberty’. The other ‘sees it instead as a tense and unsteady field of force, constructed and sustained in every instance by ...”

“... by the very words used to assert it. Thus the permanence of the Greek eros can be made to sound self-evident by the mere repetition of the concept of the erotic and of the word eros. Part of the purpose of Calasso’s narrative and expository method is to recapture the magical dimensions of mythical language. For Calasso it took divine interference in human ...”

“... or agitation.’ Delicately, Gilmour allows us to find our own present-day examples of this self-serving tendency, while supplying plenty from the 18th century. Sir Robert Walpole, effective prime minister from 1722 to 1742, was both joyously corrupt and a ruthless exponent of one-party government, yet he seems genuinely to have believed that all ...”

“... plainly even than this, however: his paid-for advertising slots include a sound-bite in which a self-consciously shirt-sleeved Riordan is telling business-folk, none of whom is black, that ‘to get jobs, we’ve got to make LA safe.’ It’s fair to assume he’s not talking about making the city safe for the likes of Rodney King to drive in. Riordan’s ...”

“... book has to offer. It also contains musings on such matter as the nature of Beethoven’s creative self-criticism and speculation about the origin of commercial book-publishing in the Athens of Pisistratus; but such thoughts can hardly be developed within the compass of a short lecture in a way that will generate any conviction in their plausibility which is ...”

“... all are framed within an idealistic commitment to ‘liberty’ at home and abroad. It’s a self-satisfied view of America’s global significance which prompts a snort of derision from Chomsky, who takes a side-swipe at an earlier attempt by Robert Tucker to define ‘America’s historic purpose’. The complacency underpinning The Imperial Temptation ...”

“... proper way of dealing with nationalists and momentously decided that in the spirit of enlightened self-interest it was best to enlist their co-operation in various aspects of administration. The men-on-the-spot were never at home with this approach. Co-operation with Africans did not come naturally to them, and some detected a whiff of cynicism in the new ...”

“... she or someone else lived I might have been worth something.’ The book does not end with this self-pitying note, however. On the last page (before appendices and index) Leonard places Thomson’s translation of ‘Childhood’, a poem dedicated by Heine to his own sister. It recalls himself and her as children playing at being old, worn-out people and ...”