“... and paradoxes run rampant as she describes the convoluted nature of her tale: ‘deception and self-deception . . . blurring of truth and reality . . . secrets and lies. Yet it also contains generosity, goodwill, absurdity, laughter, tenderness and a good measure of love.’ At which point, overloaded by the blinding chiaroscuro of it all, I think: dear ...”

“... in the following lines from ‘No hay olvido’, and they are not locked in a room of the self. On the contrary, there is a great deal of tenderness towards others, and if the phrase about wanting to forget clearly glances at the poem’s title and implies a stark impossibility, the very form of the sentence reminds us discreetly that the thing can ...”

“... to be convinced that he had a heart after all. Maybe Blair will end his term with a similarly self-serving expression of ...”

“... hounds and loyal mediocrities, with the latter preponderating over time. Compared to this, the self-conscious embrace of elitist methods of selection looks positively attractive, especially if ways could be found to inject some political responsiveness into the selection process. Consider the way the Germans handle an analogous problem. Their ...”

“... the UN for everything.’ And these are people who lost everything in the course of a struggle for self-determination. Do not think it was lost on us that the Kenyans, and every international body that monitors or provides for the displaced, customarily places its refugees in the least desirable regions on earth. There we become utterly dependent – unable ...”

“... keep things going. Existentialism turns such thoughts into fear and trembling, but also a kind of self-loathing. Yet even here there is a strange play between the Promethean and the Orphic. There may be a physicist’s response to the wonder (or dread) of existence, and I do not mean the much touted idea of a Big Bang when everything came into being. The ...”

“... originally conceived as the finale of the B flat Quartet, Op. 130, but later detached to form a self-sufficient piece. As the opening Allegro charges along with manic exuberance, there is a feeling of exploring uncharted territory: huge vistas are glimpsed but are tantalisingly out of reach. The pace is relentless, the dynamics always forte. Then suddenly ...”

“... with censorship becoming a vital part of the emergency powers, thereby rendering neutrality self-sustaining. At the same time, the need to justify Ireland’s stance saw the emergence of sophisticated moral and political arguments in favour of neutrality. Fine Gael’s readiness to toe the government’s line helped greatly. Neutrality also needed to be ...”

“... Too often iconic buildings are asked somehow to stand in for the civic realm, as if imagistic self-promotion were all that citizens can safely expect from politicians and designers today. Rogers, like Foster and Piano (with whom, for better or worse, he will always be triangulated), emerged in the interregnum between the engineered abstraction of modern ...”

“... dose of it as therapy for what is either hypocritical or brutally cynical, if not simply blind and self-absorbed, in American thinking about the great outside world beyond those apparently dismally protected US borders.At which point, the philosophical problem of relativism rears its ugly head and another round of polemics, in a somewhat different spirit and ...”

“... western islands and to make plays out of what he found there. One of the triumvirate which ran the self-consciously culturally-nationalist Abbey Theatre (the others were Yeats and Augusta Gregory), Synge completed five plays between 1902 and 1909, when he died from Hodgkin’s disease. Despite his metropolitan upbringing and Protestant heritage, all of his ...”

“... and its Kabul ‘puppet’ suffered total defeat. In doing so, the US flouted not only its own self-interest (regional stability) but also the Geneva Accords which it had signed in 1988. Why, once a Soviet withdrawal was on offer and had even begun, Washington energetically promoted Islamist violence in Afghanistan, at the same time as spending a second ...”

“... what may seem to be a certain naivety in Kraus’s views. The ‘forms of human culture . . . were self-evidently true if they had the blessing of language, that language of which he naively believed that it could say everything worth saying, and was incapable of deceiving him who spoke it truthfully.’ To believe that language can say everything worth saying ...”

“... it evidence of a ravenous and indiscriminate Indian appetite for European goods. Indians remained self-sufficient in terms of food and housing all through the colonial period. They did replace many of their tools and weapons with European manufactures, but sometimes this served only to increase their own manufactures. The acquisition of awls, needles and ...”

“... science) that flows, in Toulmin’s view, from its disciplinary narrowness, its arrogance and its self-referential hyper-professionalism. It’s a position Toulmin came to quite naturally. Having trained in physics, and worked on radar in the RAF during the Second World War, he went up to Cambridge in 1946 to read philosophy. Richard Braithwaite was his ...”