“... Johnson’s account, the wilful refusal of optical amelioration was the prime cause of Swift’s self-isolation. ‘Having thus excluded conversation, and desisted from study, he had neither business nor amusement; for having by some ridiculous resolution or made vow, determined never to wear spectacles, he could make little use of books in his later ...”

“... It’s doubly shaming – shaming to remember as well, to feel so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people’s purgatory. The only writer I know of who has done justice to the experience is a science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury. He has a 1953 story, ‘The Playground’, where a father makes a pact with the powers of evil in order to ...”

“... confession in modern poetry may have helped condition Birch’s sympathy for the high-minded self-indulgence, the dotty and at times distracted character of much of Ruskin’s later writings. Gillian Beer, in a scintillating, funny and touching contribution to The Sun is God, which concerns Darwin’s work on earthworms and Victorian anxieties about the ...”

“... tracks. In later life – civil servant that he was – he rarely if ever committed his private self to incriminating paper. One result is that we know absolutely nothing of his sexual life other than that he married. And his wife Rose is as elusive a personage as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Super is reduced to dredging up passages from Doctor Thorne and ...”

“... Elish (‘When on high’). Smith’s dedication to this austere branch of study (in which he was self-taught, being by profession an engraver) arose from a passionate interest in the historical books of the Old Testament, and the early advances of Assyriology undoubtedly owed much to its relevance to Biblical study. But scholarly attention soon spread to the ...”

“... attention. The additional stigma attached to Aids, and the dire prognosis, may also discourage self-referral on the part of the high-risk but symptom-free. The strenuous attempt by the medical establishment to get everyone worried, despite the low incidence in the old industrialised countries of HIV infection outside specific groups has become a target of ...”

“... a flirt, a charmer, a dandyess and a poseuse. If somebody has put this sort of effort into their self-projection, it’s kind of by the way to call them affected or inauthentic, for, unlike, say, Simone de Beauvoir, they have never pretended to be anything else. You just have to decide whether you are impressed by the effect or not, and go on your way ...”

“... die. Dolabella has no sooner gone than Cleopatra actually makes an attempt, on stage, to kill her self (‘Quick, quick, good hands!’) and is instantly disarmed by Proculeius; the Romans, we now learn, are watching like hawks. At V.ii. Cleopatra finally learns, unequivocally, from Dolabella what she has previously suspected, that she will be led in triumph ...”

“... Kazakhstan, they have carved out a geographical area for themselves where they practise effective self-government. In the Caucasus, the interwoven skein of little peoples continues to unravel in violence, with uncompromising claims for land and justice – but justice from whom? None of this will ‘solve itself’. Zhirinovsky is the malign child striking ...”

“... into the 19th century – it seems to have been, like Blind Harry’s Wallace, something which no self-respecting Scots household was complete without. This popularity has caused modern scholars some perplexity. It is not that early readers of the poem knew something about it that we don’t, to judge from the parody of 1701 that Jack quotes, in which ...”

“... sculling on the Neckar was another Englishman. But in spite of all the defects, the emotional self-indulgence, the melancholy (after all, he lost two wives whom he liked), the meanness to his daughters (Virginia reckoned he spent about £300 on her education), he still emerges as ‘an adorable man, and somehow tremendous’. It is Virginia Woolf’s ...”

“... to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up to then’. Why such essentially vain self-criticism? And if Pynchon really does feel so deprecatory, if the collection is therefore of mostly historical value, then by what critical scruple did he choose to omit the only other story he has published, ‘Mortality and Mercy in ...”

“... him as an ambitious and hard-working man who went to work at the age of 13 and from then on was self-taught by attendance at night classes (none of them concerned with science). His father and mother worked their way up in the world ‘into what might be called the lower middle class’ by sheer hard work and resolved at whatever cost to themselves to ...”

“... with Bikhu Parekh’s efforts to unravel her political philosophy. Much of it strikes me as rather self-contradictory; and its general purport does not seem to get us very far. She discussed revolution at some length, ignoring classes, economics and even religion. She contemplated writing about Marx, but seems to have shrunk from the creative effort – that ...”

“... French writing on the Revolution, from Michelet onwards, has taken the form of the historian’s self-identification, whether from a Royalist or from a Republican point of view, with the events he was commemorating. As Lefebvre once said of Robespierre, ‘Après tout, c’est mon ami.’ For Furet this is easily understood since French politics, from 1789 ...”