“... the temper of the times, and very much in the spirit of the later Wittgenstein, who was also self-consciously out of step with the times, and who remains for the most part unassimilated by contemporary philosophy, in spite of being conventionally venerated as one of the few great philosophers of the 20th century. Stroud’s philosophical ...”

“... Underworld at War remind us on the jacket that ‘the Second World War produced numerous acts of self-sacrifice.’ (‘Innumerable’ might have been better than ‘numerous’.) The author doesn’t doubt that ‘a great majority of the nation had been brave, obedient, conscientious throughout the war.’ The East End of London, it is fair to assume, had ...”

“... His presence was real, part of the living tissue of our culture, our responses, our most intimate self-understanding. His destruction is therefore a radically violent act, not only against Him but against ourselves. And His corpse remains unburied; the stench of His putrefying culture still lingers in the nostrils – in, for example, the morality of ...”

“... a majority are MSM – men who have sex with men. So, although syphilis is a shadow of its former self, it has not gone away, just like another ‘old’ pathogen, tuberculosis, the decline of which has been reversed since HIV began turning off immune systems and drug-resistant mutants were encouraged by poorly administered therapy. Forgetting about ...”

“... claustrophobia hovered over it, giving rise to doubts about the limitless possibilities of art and self-reinvention – the very things everyone came for in the first place. The Lion’s Head was gone, but there was still the Beatrice Inn, still Thomas’s White Horse Tavern, still the beautiful red Village Cigars. And there were still a few of the older ...”

“... 1950, the notion that cities such as London, Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff were not in principle self-governing, or that local authorities existed to administer nationally determined policy, would hardly have surfaced. And yet by the 1920s, where costly services such as public education were concerned, the balance between money raised on the rates and grants ...”

“... enhance society and the environment). Patrick Geddes had predicted this in the 1890s, along with self-government. Which is why Geddes – a recurrent presence in the novels of Alasdair Gray – counts as a patron of devolution, and indeed of that peaceable civic Europe in which Gray’s ‘Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Republic’ would find its place. The ...”

“... effects. This ambivalence, visible in his alternation between simple lyrics and laments of drunken self-absorption, is missing from Mariengof’s work, leaving only a succession of mangled metaphors, whose emptiness can be misread as straightforward unpleasantness. This is not to suggest that Mariengof was simply trying to épater le bourgeois. The devastation ...”

“... threats posed by that insecurity – loss of a framework for living and the foundations of self-respect, which other social institutions are less able to compensate for than once they were. A second danger has to do with an old problem concerning power. Following an unpleasant if understandable logic, bullies gravitate towards the insecure. To the ...”

“... elections of December 2001 outright. Ravalomanana is often called the ‘Yoghurt King’. He is a self-made millionaire, head of Tiko, the largest Malagasy-owned private business, which makes and markets yoghurt and soft drinks throughout the country. The Yoghurt King promised government reform: honesty, efficiency, even cleanliness. As Mayor of ...”

“... is sometimes laboured indeed,’ and this seems just right. But there is worry and energy and self-parody in the labour too. Nabokov rarely mentions Véra’s condition, or asks about it. He tells her how much he loves her, wishes she would write more, and insistently describes the clothes he has on, as if he were a model or a disguise artist: ‘I am ...”

“... his own peculiar distillation of Islamic history and idealised bedouin values (egalitarianism, self-reliance). Despite his tribal background, there is now, thanks to him, a greater sense of a united Libya than ever existed before. What brought this about was the redistribution of oil income, which in the 1970s and 1980s dramatically increased the living ...”

“... you can imagine him in a film with Richard Wattis – but his virtues shine out in our age of self-indulgence, celebrity and spin. Jago records how, on the way to the Lords in later life, Attlee was accosted by a fellow passenger: ‘Good Lord! Do people ever tell you that you are the spitting image of Clement Attlee?’ ‘Frequently,’ Attlee ...”

“... the Israelis recognised the organisation they would somehow also be recognising its programme of self-determination. The thinking is abstract: it takes no account of the shifting legal ground over which negotiations are conducted, and fails to anticipate the other side’s legal case, which makes it unable to respond adequately. At a meeting of the ...”

“... a small minority all over the Greek world, literally hundreds of local oracles emerged, as well as self-styled experts (chrêsmologoi) in interpreting the ambiguities, obscurities and riddles of what purported to be divine messages. As Heraclitus, cited by Plutarch, remarked: ‘The lord whose shrine is at Delphi neither states nor conceals, but signs ...”