“... seriousness of one who has thought long and fairly deeply. The writing could not be said to show self-knowledge or wisdom, perhaps, and Eisenstein admits this, admits, even, its ‘completely shameless narcissism’: but, alertly translated by Eisenstein’s former student Herbert Marshall, it is a convincing demonstration of Baudelaire’s idea that ‘the ...”

“... so, he involves himself (the implication is, through no fault of the author’s) in a startling self-contradiction. A story like this is, of course, a gift to the semiotician. Professor Eco uses it to introduce the latest (and most fashionable) developments in modal logic – in particular, the theory of possible worlds. The result scarcely makes sense, and ...”

“... morality, less oppressive than the existing one and juster in that it put the general good before self and loved ones – though this last precept may have borne hard on their children. Holcroft’s 16-year-old son and Godwin’s 22-year-old stepdaughter Fanny Imlay both committed suicide after running away from home. Godwin made his own daughter Mary Shelley ...”

“... His great rag-bag of sources hangs around him like an albatross. He is a sort of caricature of a self-taught Victorian wallowing in a confused mass of science and religion, and he is well-instructed in neither. He is at his happiest when the poet takes over, as in ‘The Innumerable Christ’ (in Sangshaw), a sort of Space project which sees Christs ...”

“... of factor VIII may be concentrated from as many as twenty thousand donors. Britain may soon be self-sufficient in factor VIII: a definite advance, since the incidence of AIDS in Britain is relatively low (31 cases reported by the beginning of this year). The fact, welcome or unwelcome, appears to be that chastity among homosexuals is on the increase. One ...”

“... the Congress Party, not to be confused with the person Indira Gandhi, who could be civilised and self-deprecating with the best of them, distancing herself with a smile and an elegant shrug of her shoulders from the flood of panegyric which her fawning courtiers chose to lavish upon her. At another level, this enigmatic person, omnivorous autocrat and ...”

“... Scottish control of the trade to England was a valuable source of revenue. Scots have long held self-congratulatory beliefs about their educational system. It is claimed that in the 18th and 19th centuries it was a bond, with all social classes using the parish school, and at the same time a source of social mobility so far as it enabled the ‘lad ...”

“... pleasure of tranquillity, and the peace of the religious life may have seemed to her an exquisite self-indulgence.’ I doubt it. She probably felt more like Héloïse. In ‘The Abiding Vision’ Rebecca West treats the theme with the utmost ambivalence. Lily the showgirl seems to businessman Sam Hartley, and through his eyes to us, to have the sort of ...”

“... psychotic’, ‘your whore’, ‘your psychotic whore’, ‘your adulterous slut’, ‘a self-serving ignorant slut’, ‘a lying slut’, ‘dishonest, ignorant, and tasteless’. Mrs Harris remarks of her: ‘Her voice is vomitous to me.’ Yet such is Mrs Harris’s travail that she cannot perceive that these terms might change the doctor’s ...”

“... work through its consequences until they either give a consistent and believable answer or become self-contradictory. A sample of this type is the numerical solution of the multiplication sum, BALL × BAT = TEAPOT. It is easy to see that L must equal 1, and that B can be only 2 or 3. To get any further one has to plump for one or other figure for B and go ...”

“... that, had he wished, he could have been the winner). Afterwards, when I told my fellow students (self-professed intellectuals to a man) how I had spent that day, I was struck by their lack of interest in the author of Regain and Que ma joie demeure as compared to their curiosity about Fachleitner, le berger de Manosque. Some years later, when I was living by ...”

“... are damaging: for any realistic forecast must be gloomy, and gloomy forecasts are apt to be self-fulfilling. They believe that the way to minimise damage to the university system is to carry on all our activities as usual, and to react to external pressures as little and as late as possible: that policy will avoid unnecessary sacrifices, and may lead to ...”

“... is more vivid than Flaubert’s own deliberations on the subject: he once described his adolescent self as ‘a mushroom swollen with boredom’. But then Sartre seems unwilling – too jealous, even – to give Flaubert his head in quotation. Within the fictional flow there are occasional passages of trenchant analysis. The Sartre of Les Mots returns with ...”

“... paper on the SLA version of radical feminism’ and ran her own gun classes. Presumably it was the self-confidence that followed from this which enabled her to start thinking about a return to civilian life. When she told the others that she felt like jacking it in, they were shocked. ‘You can’t do that,’ they said, or she says they said: ‘You’re a ...”

“... a climber seeking more difficult pitches, or a mystic trying for more complete forgetfulness of self, Irwin has looked for a way of making works of art which deal with perception, but not with things perceived. Redness that is not a red thing, but redness pure and simple. An art which points at, but does not transform its subject-matter. Sometimes he seems ...”