“... pilgrimage. There is no doubt that this is 12th, not seventh-century work: apart from the obvious self-interest, no real Anglo-Saxon would have put a masculine singular definite article in front of a plural noun (‘se muneces’), nor produced the strange conflation of singular and plural, nominative/accusative and dative, seen in ‘to pa munecan ...”

“... at all – that Shapin tells so incisively. If no one now takes seriously T. S. Eliot’s entirely self-promoting notion of a dissociation of sensibility that supposedly took place in the 17th century, it is generally acknowledged that something more momentous – less literary – than sensibilities did change in that period, a period of astonishing cultural ...”

“... the cause could have encouraged him to make a confession of failure out of a piece of wry, modest self-deprecation. The trouble is, Millais’s judgment, in whatever spirit it was made, has been that of posterity. Peter Funnell’s essay in the catalogue of the exhibition now at the National Portrait Gallery quotes Arthur Symons, writing in 1896, a few months ...”

“... something they might possess concretely enough to justify a sense of loss. In an Anglocentric, self-contained Britain, that massive project begun over four hundred years ago, to be English, and to speak English, was always meant to be unremarkable and quotidian, part of a commitment to sameness, not difference. In such a context, the central unspoken ...”

“... between ‘high’ and popular art, and most of all his insistence on the malleability of the self – are those which Modernism provided in embryo. Whereas the bits of Brecht that are distinctly un-Post-Modern – usefulness, usedness, simplicity, weight – are precisely those elements of Modernism whose absence defines the difference.Like Jameson, I ...”

“... progenitor of electromagnetic field theory and statistical thermodynamics, but a man of self-mocking humour, whose obiter dicta would well fill thirty minutes’ chat. In vain: a physicist and eminent populariser of science told the producer that whereas a genius such as Michael Faraday would have been awarded three different Nobel Prizes had they ...”

“... of roles. Athenian performances may have been ubiquitous and dynamic, but they were also very self-consciously performances; Athenians never seem to have confused playing at something with ‘the real thing’. This does not necessarily mean we have to invoke some pre-modern instability of identity, it may simply be that as cultural actors Athenians were ...”

“... His charm and conversation were praised by his contemporaries, and he was certainly pretty if the self-portraits are true, but it is hard to put together a personality for him. The quotations from Bellori given in the catalogue amount to a success story in which the hero is more or less a cipher. He married Mary Ruthven, a Scottish lady-in-waiting, in ...”

“... with the Treasury, but the super-caution that Blair’s Government practises is merely self-defeating. The Treasury’s historical record gives it no claim to a special wisdom. The Government is also mistaken in its view of Middle England. People’s attitudes to taxation – assuming they even know how much they pay – are more complicated than ...”

“... His lectures were packed, and audiences were impressed with his sincerity and spirit of self-sacrifice. He had decided to dedicate his life to converting Africans to Christianity, he said and to abolishing the slave trade. He described central Africa in glowing terms. There were minerals awaiting exploitation, he said, land suitable for growing ...”

“... are furious remarks by the likes of Randolph Churchill to the effect that Eden was ‘a hysterical self-serving prima donna’. Thorpe is so squeamish that even when he tells us that Eden’s son, Nicholas, died of Aids, he doesn’t explicitly state that he was gay. Yet, annoyingly, his opinions on all manner of other matters and politicians, right down to ...”

“... meeting-group of intellectuals. Gathered around a full table, covered with a white tablecloth and self-brewed coffee, the assembled people tearfully honoured their fallen colleagues and praised the great event of being able to sit together, look at the white tablecloth, and talk to each other like human beings . . . And the human beings suddenly felt like ...”

“... were written for the people. He taught the French to mistrust the privileged fleur-de-lis, the self-serving Phrygian cap of the French Revolution and the Second Empire’s imperial bee, and to prefer instead the awkward, unkillable cockerel. What he described in fact was not Frenchness at all, but a simple generosity of spirit. His heroes have travelled ...”

“... provinces into a new country for which its inhabitants evinced no enthusiasm. The United States, self-proclaimed heir to dominion over the Arab world, is now finding its way through the imperial morass. American Armed Forces secured the oil, the pipelines, the oil ministry, the airbases and the ports. They left the museums, the palaces, the hospitals and the ...”

“... selection gave us two conflicting tendencies. The first is the product of ‘selfish genes’: our self-aggrandising desire to reproduce at the expense of others. In modern society, this translates into avarice, wrath, lust, gluttony and the other deadly sins. The second tendency is for societies to erect moral codes, which often frown on behaviour encoded by ...”