“... below the rank of gentleman were few indeed, though some – like Sir William Petty – were self-made. ‘Those of high rank’ tended to monopolise discussions, which accordingly often became ‘trivial’. Many ‘serious scientists’ ceased to attend. Sprat’s History of the Royal Society was a propagandist document, which attempted – whilst ...”

“... and what Leslie Fiedler calls in his recent book on freaks ‘myths and images of the secret self’. None of these phenomena except possibly the last, however, can explain the fascination which the Elephant Man had for the working-class patrons of the show in the Whitechapel Road, or the social celebrities who flocked to drink tea with Merrick in his ...”

“... the Middle Ages were still going strong in 1789. Serfdom, patrimonial jurisdiction, the economic self-sufficiency of the estate centred on the great house were still realities determining the whole tone of society over huge tracts of Eastern and Central Europe. Even in what we have learned carelessly to call ‘advanced’ countries (the adjective itself is ...”

“... on the testimony, that full awareness can develop. To this extent, Sweetsir is a work built on the self-importance of the Lawrentian proposition that only fiction can give us the ‘whole hog’. Yglesias’s novel is an effective mixture of fashionable polemic, courtroom melodrama and topical allusion to currently celebrated crimes of passion. Whether women ...”

“... by their own inhabitants in Kampala and other towns were a grim foretaste of the political self-destruction in store, which culminated in last December’s election. In a typical Ugandan political paradox, faith in the election was such that virtually everyone voted, even if they had to queue for a day to do so, but the results read over Uganda Radio ...”

“... consists of one oracular pronouncement after another about language, and the world, and even the self and ethics and God, followed by the observation that to have understood all those remarks correctly is to see that they can say nothing at all. We are to throw them away after we have used them to grasp everything important – namely, what cannot be ...”

“... particularly drawn to the marginal state where the solitary world of the child borders on pure and self-sufficient autism. In ‘Maurice’s Room’, a boy can only communicate with the world by the exotic clutter he accumulates in his room. When his family move to the country, they rehabilitate Maurice by finding him a barn, as rich in rural clutter. The ...”

“... the ‘epicene waif’, Isabelle Eberhardt, who tried to ‘do a Pierre Loti’ in Algeria; and a self-intoxicated Scot, John ‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor, whose speciality was reaching the source of rivers by canoe, even when the source was a turgid swamp (his lecture called ‘Arma Virumque Canoe’, with practical demonstrations, had the mechanics’ institutes ...”

“... Eric Sams’s edition of Edmund Ironside, advertised as ‘Shakespeare’s lost play’, a neat self-contradiction as well as a declaration of prodigality, suffers from the same fragility of evidence without offering much encouragement from the text. Edmund Ironside has been known and read much more widely than ‘Shall I die?’ and few critics sprang to ...”

“... argument, or rather quasi-religious faith, is dragged into service, including the growth of the self-employed, although the election study shows that 71 per cent of them voted Conservative. But there was very little of his sort of cranky nonsense at this year’s Liberal Assembly in Dundee, and for once the Liberal Party looked the part of a conventional ...”

“... to defeat the NUM – the Coldstream Guards of organised labour – if she was to succeed in her self-appointed role of kicking the whole trade union movement into the Tory future and away from the principles of Labour Party style corporatism. This is the general case: that the NUM was targeted by the Government as the last great obstacle to an efficient ...”

“... man who wants to succeed in the world and remain decent at the same time. The twin discoveries of self and society are to the novel what counterpoint is to music, and Stendhal is their unequalled master. Lucien is Stendhal’s luckiest hero. Unlike Julien Sorel or Fabrizio del Dongo, he has a jovial and affectionate father who believes that ‘a son is a ...”

“... to endure endless fasts, to rise in the middle of the night for meditation and suffer agonies of self-reproach for dozing beyond the appointed hour? Puritanism roams the highway of our history, and before we could ‘explain’ it we would need to have the measure of the beast. Seaver’s book would be as good a starting-point as ...”

“... with the classes so much more divided. Thus the 1830s and 1840s saw socialists promoting a self-developing Lamarckian biology as an anti-Church-and-State device. Bourgeois Benthamites exploited Geoffroy’s philosophical anatomy, while Dissenting mercantilists sported a progressive naturalistic cosmogony. Oxbridge divines and ‘Old ...”

“... attender at funerals and a good friend to those in trouble. He disliked the telephone, motor-cars, self-advertisers, Jews and universal education. ‘In the old days,’ he said, ‘the daughters of concierges became danseuses: now they have diplomas from the town hall.’ He was angry at any attempt to obtain public honours for him. The background which ...”