“... example, whether animals believe things (apparently they don’t), to whether the concept of the self is irreducible (apparently it is), to how many people it takes to think about a light bulb (apparently it takes two; see below). A lot of the fun of reading these papers is seeing how an exiguous collection of commitments plays out in so many different ...”

“... regularly assumed in the text. For all the continuity one might choose to see between his jocular, self-referring methods and those in favour with Postmodernists, it’s likely that this late novel, read from scratch, would be found as pointlessly out of kilter as were Les Gommes or Dans le labyrinthe in their day, which would prove that for all the efforts ...”

“... probably the whole place is Purgatory, since nearly all of us are so, so to speak, hell-bent on self-improvement. Something about my dear weird Golden State obliges it to assume allegorical and oracular proportions. A quarter of a century ago, everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Umberto Eco scanned it as a sort of crystal ball in which the future could be ...”

“... Ring, and to us when we see the Ring performed. I think Wagner’s model for the Ring was, quite self-consciously, not Lear or anything else Shakespearean, but Aeschylus’ Oresteia sequence, of which the Ring offers a sort of dialectical critique (the suggestion has been made before – see, for example, Michael Ewans’s Wagner and Aeschylus: The ...”

“... and generous style of life and his ineradicable conviction of his own slighted genius. He was self-destructive, intense in his friendships, unlucky in love, but perhaps making more of that than most people feel they should. He could, without blushing, apply to himself the lines of Hopkins: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall ...”

“... opinion in order to prioritise elite judgment. When decision-making devolves onto a small group of self-consciously well-informed individuals, it is all too likely that they will lead each other astray, trusting too much in their own judgment and reinforcing each other’s prejudices. Take one recent example: the Iraq war. (I know, I know, we have to move on ...”

“... posters describing themselves as Concerned Muslims Living in Tower Hamlets. There was little moral self-examination. Hizb ut-Tahrir forbade its members to take out insurance policies (betting on an act of God was unlawful), but many insured their cars under a family member’s name. The party encouraged Muslim women to cover themselves completely, but allowed ...”

“... on a tray’ – bring back to Mrs Dalloway the echoes of her competence, her centrality and self-confidence. Lucy, her parlourmaid, thinks her mistress, who is ‘mistress of silver, of linen, of china’, the loveliest among the guests at the party. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ Mrs Dalloway returns, ‘in gratitude to her servants generally for helping ...”

“... be able to impersonate another would require a surpassing intelligence, an extraordinary degree of self-control and an ever-alert discipline – all qualities Frau Tschaikovsky in no way possesses.’ (Frau Tschaikovsky was Anna’s official name at the time.) But in reality no such qualities are required, only a mulish determination to keep it up and a ...”

“... was somehow seduced by the regime. Tooze shows that Speer continued right to the end to produce self-serving statistics and to coerce concentration camp victims to maintain production, even when it was clear to all reasonable people that the war was lost. And Speer was not alone: there was no simple division between technocrats and ideologues in the Nazi ...”

“... Iraqi communities pursue reconciliation, strengthen moderates and speed the transition to Iraqi self-reliance,’ he said in June. The NSC is more explicit in its July report. These small bands of political operatives, it says, ‘are charged with supporting moderate elements against extremists in their areas of responsibility and launching projects that ...”

“... proceeds in this way, but it feels cogent and compelling even when there is little more than self-belief holding it up. This is certainly a more meaningful kind of inquiry than the more fashionable sub-genre of the celebrity suspect. Over the years these have included Queen Victoria’s grandson, the Duke of Clarence; a celebrated doctor, Sir William ...”

“... idea of a “new song” is highlighted in several psalms. In a sense, this is a kind of self-advertisement of the psalmist, as if to say “here is a fresh and vibrant psalm that you have never heard before.”’ It is remarkable that, in some two thousand of such notes, most of them longer than these, very little outside of Alter’s own ...”

“... her mother and aunt taught her, she sewed and embroidered diligently for both her sanity and her self-preservation.’ After she left the tower, people called her ‘the new Antigone’, but perhaps ‘the new Penelope’ would have been more apt. She did not bring to her needlework the hatred of the tricoteuses; she was not a vicious woman, except where the ...”

“... are, the process of oil painting appears to have made Brainard aware that he lacked a certain self-belief, or egotism, a quality which painters determined at all costs to be great seemed to him to share. He feared he hadn’t sufficient ‘patience’, as he put it in a letter to Fairfield Porter of 1972, to do justice to the ‘authority oils carry for ...”