“... dissection of their arguments, his unsparing determination to catch them out, as he often does, in self-contradiction, grants their thinking more respectful attention than it deserves. On the evidence amassed here, Woolf’s own dismissive contempt – ‘I cant conceive how anybody can be fool enough to believe in a doctor,’ she wrote to Violet Dickinson in ...”

“... seeking to identify the influences that shaped a body of literature come equipped with a self-destruct mechanism in the form of two beguiling but potentially compromising accomplices, the companion fallacies of post hoc ergo propter hoc and the single cause. It may be merely a coincidence, after all, that it was only after the dissemination of ...”

“... of the period thought that works of art should have a rich symbolic content, but it is by no means self-evident that this was the case. The traditional justification for religious images is that they are the Bible of the unlettered, that they instruct and remind the faithful about their beliefs. This need not exclude symbolism of a simple, familiar ...”

“... cultural stereotypes of a stagnant Occitan economy did not admit access to sudden wealth, or men self-made by licit, natural means. It is worth recalling that the same rules hold for fairy-tales, where flax is spun, harvests are mowed and forests levelled, not by human effort, whose range is recognized as sadly limited, but by supernatural intervention. Le ...”

“... occurs. All women like it, this theory insists, and those who say they don’t are hypocrites, or self-deceived, or so weird or old they don’t count. Sometimes this notion is accompanied by the belief that all women like to be roughed up. There is a tiny kernel of truth in these monstrous falsifications. Women, like men, have been known to say ‘no’ when ...”

“... and Henslowe’s Diary are not the most immediately engaging of works, and they usually induce a self-indulgent dullness in the scholars who discuss them: but such texts come to life in Hattaway’s hands. He has formidable gifts as an expositor. Particularly impressive is the long first section of the book, devoted to stages, audiences, gestures and ...”

“... of which you would see a great deal more at any Rugby League match – but the players’ self-consciousness. In this example, as in most RPGs, the central motif is combat, and the players choose aggressive roles from a limited and stereotyping repertoire (after all, there must have been little skinny barbarians and slow subtle ones as well as the ...”

“... you grow used to them,’ he says, ‘Titian’s three spaces come to seem like three systems of self locked within a single head, almost as if they were the three faces of Eve.’ But the decoding has only just begun. A page later: ‘Catching your breath, you realise that Titian is making you think – much as you might be forced to think about the ...”

“... Karl Polanyi, debates with whom have a central place in the volume. Polanyi argued that the self-regulating market economy had emerged only recently in world history, in the course of the ‘Great Transformation’, as he called it, of the 19th century. Braudel, on the other hand, suggests that a market economy can be found co-existing with a non-market ...”

“... there were three friendly, dapper young policemen standing at my door, all trained in the art of self-defence, all equipped with life-preservers. One asked me my name, calling me ‘sir’. When I told him, he called me ‘Norman’. Policemen always use one’s forename, once they have found it out. ‘Well, Norman,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to ...”

“... Rameau and the Paradoxe sur le Comédien, as a brilliant experiment in textuality, as an instantly self-deconstructing text. ‘Am I a prisoner in the midst of a sign or am I a spider at its centre?’ asks Herbert innocently, pondering the position of his bedroom window in the middle of the neon lights that announce the best pet shop in the world. He won’t ...”

“... have met elsewhere. His colleagues and BBC contemporaries included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to ...”

“... was bound to have. Eleven days after meeting his deadline on Indochina, PMF announced a scheme for self-government in Tunisia which brought another bitter colonial war to an end. To the fury of the colonial lobby, the decision and the speed with which it was made were wondrously popular in France. Even Le Canard Enchainé admitted, with embarrassment, that ...”

“... point), it cannot cope with that concomitant of certain forms of life – mind. In particular my self-awareness, which I am prepared to allow is shared by other humans and possibly some animals, is a property lying entirely outside the scheme of physical science. The basic assumption of science is that there are certain facts of common observation on which ...”

“... The timing of opinions is a strong indication that not much factual support is needed for national self-congratulation, and now we are presented in R.A. Houston’s work with a numerical analysis which sets out to show that there was nothing very special in the level of 18th-century Scottish literacy. Houston has collected figures of those able to sign from ...”