“... the Ciceronians, whose ‘reform’ of traditional Christian vocabulary he found both pompous and self-defeating. At the same time, he was not comfortable with un-classical usage, and would argue that, if it was possible for the translator of the Bible to correct alien forms with acceptable Latin on some occasions, it ought to be possible to do so thoughout ...”

“... to the body of commentaries produced by both their devotees and their critics, and contain as many self-deconstructing texts as ‘totalising’ ones. And while granting that canons do embody ‘traditions’, he points out that, without some equivalent of the notion of tradition, there would be no need for ‘the special forms of attention elicited by ...”

“... of liberal political institutions as oriented toward a provisional telos – a widely-shared but self-limiting consensus on the highest good achievable ... But this telos justifies a kind of tolerance foreign to the classical theological tradition.’ I have no quarrel with this. Unfortunately, moral diversity is lost to view in these worthy prescriptions ...”

“... there was something grim and lugubrious in Tom’s life, which he very often exposed in bursts of self-pity and sarcasm. And there was something a little depressing about his lavatorial stipulations: his positive preference for the dripping cistern and the reek of chemical disinfectant. Wheen is wrong to say that Tom ‘could hardly shake hands with a woman ...”

“... up the old Martin Luther King rhetoric to see the power of militant language. Jackson may be a self-advertising photo-opportunist, but he has the magic words, the political jive-talk, the rhetorical style, and with them he has simply rolled over black politicians whose claims were based on mere competence and practicality. South Africa could well see the ...”

“... on the compassion of others nor receive it. For them illness is not to lose peace and liberty and self-respect only, but their own selves – the continuous history, their past, which constitutes their identity. An entry by J.S. Mill recounts how, under the experience of profound depression, he lived, as it were, automatically and could remember next to ...”

“... permitted them to conclude that their belief was justified. It was a type of socially-determined self-deception. Yet again, Marxists should have no problem with this: the most powerful analysis of what happens in a social system when élites turn to memory and ideas, dead in themselves, and manipulate them to enforce a regressive reconstruction, is Marx’s ...”

“... fact reveals mainly glamour and soap-opera distress, while concealing large amounts of squalor and self-serving. Like Singin’ in the Rain, we might say, and Truffaut retorts that Godard’s films don’t tell the whole truth either, that he is merely a specialist in looking clean: ‘That’s always been one of your gifts, setting yourself up as the eternal ...”

“... external responsibility and college work agree with human nature better than lonely self-culture.’ Henry, of course, chose Europe and the abnormal, unhygienic life of a writer. There is a revealing letter from William, written just after their father has died. By an unusual reversal, Henry is back in America while William is in London. William ...”

“... Glasgow, a place where ‘education is seen as a beautiful thing in itself rather than a means of self-improvement.’ It is only late in the novel that he turns to investigating the question of who set him up. His search plunges him into the seamier side of modern Glasgow and the novel assumes the form of a thriller, ending with a satisfying flourish. An ...”

“... who have had opinions on the future as well as the past of architecture. The emulating eye may be self-serving and envious, but it is also challenging and competitive. Goy and Berger, because they are more disinterested, are also less interested in the look of the buildings they deal with. Sometimes they seem downright indifferent. Both use (among other ...”

“... of time. She doesn’t go into the question of ‘provocation’ for, presumably, she thinks it self-evident that the women were mightily provoked. The fact that June and Hilda waited until their thirties to shoot a man who hadn’t ‘ceased to brutalise them since birth’ makes them ‘strangely heroic’ in her eyes. So too, does their ‘goodness’ to ...”

“... since Shakespeare wrote the Bastard’s great speech about it in King John, where it meant greed, self-interest, the opening bars of capitalism. Adshead’s book belongs to a recently growing genus of works on the history of particular commodities. To be of most value a study of this kind should be a part of general history, joined to the rest of human ...”

“... which he first gave us in his initial study 35 years ago and which remains among the most powerful self-depictions of the historian at work ever written. And if one other addition were possible, Watson should add at the end of the Qin volume the brief section on the peasant rebel Chen She, the first man to rise successfully against the Qin, in 209 BC. (This ...”

“... to the elements giving it an air of vulnerability at complete odds with its intrinsic aristocratic self-confidence. Le Corbusier used a hedge which moved on electric rails to open and close the surrounding views of the city. The whole thing was a wonderful jeu d’ esprit, marred only by the fact that the work went 600,000 francs over budget, the client was ...”