“... tunic. Come, old martyr! What, torment enough is it? Back to my room shall you take your sweet self! Good bye, mother-beetle: husband-eft, sufficit! See the snug niche I have made on my shelf. A’s book shall prop you up, B’s shall cover you, Here’s C to be grave with, or D to be gay, And with E on each side, and F light over you, Dry-rot at ease till ...”

“... scholar like Carlyle did in private: ‘A Book is a kind of thing that requires a man to be self-collected. He must be alone with it ... no man can read a Book well with the bustle of three or four hundred people about him! Even forgetting the mere facts which a Book contains, a man can do more with it in his own apartment, in the solitude of one ...”

“... need in the free-market societies of the 21st century will not be confined to those that seemed self-evident in the 18th and 19th. They will include environmental and social rights which have little meaning as a topic for one person’s litigation against the state, because they do not concern state interference with personal autonomy. That classic liberal ...”

“... transgression, gaiety transfiguring all that dread. Yet Greenblatt, having with whatever degree of self-awareness accomplished the fundamental shift from determinism to a random multiplicity, finds himself faced with a phase of history in which the end seems indeed to be inscribed in the beginning, in which the dice are loaded and all fall one way. There is a ...”

“... dead, as Bredekamp shows in meticulously observed detail. Flora ignores the rape of her earlier self, which lakes place immediately behind her. And Venus’s gesture of welcome offers no obvious response to the drama at the centre of which she stands. One is almost driven to sympathise with Stephen Spender, who took the painting as an allegory of Venus ...”

“... to change so that I can be against the world’ represents the same posture, but also seems to be self-mocking, more than halfway into irony, since by 1968, when he said this, Genet had shown in all kinds of ways that he wanted the world changed and was ready to help to change it. And even in the midst of his thoroughly indefensible antics, a quirky, elusive ...”

“... Adventist minister, was accused of having sacrificed her child at Ayers Rock. Koresh was a self-confessed sinner with an interest in firearms and a taste for younger women, but in these respects he can hardly be said to differ from many other American males. The evidence that he was a psychopath and a paedophile, as opposed to an unpleasant religious ...”

“... without being destroyed, gave rise to ever widening splits within the Party and, finally, to its self-immolation in the putsch of August 1991. One is forced to conclude from Yakovlev’s own description of events that the Gorbachev reformers had no idea of the scale of the changes which would follow once they began to tinker with the system. Richard Sakwa ...”

“... lives. Thanks, in part, to that sacrifice, the Germans never had enough heavy water to establish a self-sustaining chain reaction in a nuclear pile and could not even begin to make a plutonium bomb. Their experimental pile was constructed with uranium cubes, but these also became unobtainable after an Allied air-raid on the plant that made them. The Germans ...”

“... dilettanti, well-heeled authors and critics; professional whingers, crypto-communists, self-proclaimed anarchists’ and so on. This animus is never unusual in Glasgow. In fact it’s rather typical there – many of the worlds within Glasgow have spun, and continue to spin, on popular resentments to do with what kind of team you prefer or school ...”

“... a political world considered to be irredeemably fallen and inauthentic. Few critics have been as self-consciously royalist as Eliot; the republic of letters has been established under a figurehead monarchy. But something of the old notion that public affairs – notably defence policies – are mysteries of state still persists. And English poetry is still ...”

“... President Carter’s DCI, Stansfield Turner, records that ‘British intelligence remains very self-conscious about its past.’ In 1979 Jim Callaghan asked Turner: ‘Do you trust us again?’ Turner ‘gave him an answer that I hope was somewhat reassuring, but still not too positive. I did have reservations.’ Mr Laqueur’s analysis of the uses and ...”

“... Jakobson’s temptation, which is that of all structuralism, is towards anonymity and towards a self-sufficient system which tolerates but hardly seems to need human operatives. Where Jakobson favoured the closed literary form of the poem, as the most comfortable place to work, Bakhtin went to the other extreme – to the novel, construed by him as the form ...”

“... believer in Dissent and natural right, but because he was siding with the believers out of pure self-interest. Tucker wanted Britain to declare the colonies independent, whether they wished to leave or not; he took seriously the thought that America would soon become more populous and more powerful than the mother country, and that the seat of empire might ...”

“... the dogma of ‘consensus’, which in its turn is another aspect of the whole system’s loss of self-confidence. Newspapers which once cheered or booed the rival teams as they contended now conceive the football ground itself to be in need of defence. Evil men are crawling forward, determined to tear up the weedy old turf. Scargill, Benn, Ken ...”