“... the Tiers Livre we laugh at Panurge because he is mad: a man possessed by the devil, dominated by self-love and sliding down the slope of melancholy mania into stupor. In the Tiers Livre the scheme is far more complex than in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. Both worldly and Christian fools seem comic, until Rabelais turns the tables on us. For Rabelais there are ...”

“... press freedom by refusing to allow publication of editorials critical of the unions: those self-same censors are among the loudest to complain about the control exercised over editors by powerful proprietors. One important advantage of the Trade Unions running their own papers is that they might be able to foster a more co-operative attitude towards ...”

“... keep at bay the night.’ And so he did. He continued to write until his death in 1957: Self-Condemned, his autobiographical novel of the Canadian years, and his most human book, was written during those dark years. A career like Lewis’s, so various and so full of anger, is difficult to assess, or even to describe. One might begin with a remark ...”

“... I plead guilty to Lust, but I name Virginity in mitigation. I admit to Selfishness but call upon Self-Awareness in my defence. I decorate with half-palmettes the verticles of Misanthropy and list the names of those I failed to help. But I claim, too, the virtue of Tolerance and display an empty nameless list of those I ever intentionally harmed. My greatest ...”

“... great a leap from Utopia to Science’ remains strikingly heretical in the context of his self-imposed isolation from an entire range of (economic) facts relevant to the theory and practice of Marxism, and hence to the discrimination of its functions, malfunctions and alleged breakdown. In expressing his disquiet about the too-great leap, Bloch ...”

“... is because of the density of what he knows about Byron. McGann himself, as one of a new breed of self-critical critics, would presumably like this difficulty brought up and pondered on. Those of us who argue that we should like to democratise criticism, and write in order to be understood by A-Level students, are in the same difficulty as Emma ...”

“... it could be said that acts of ‘senseless kindness’ are usually no more than gestures of human self-satisfaction, the universal sentiment Tolstoy understood so well – and yet in some extraordinary way Grossman’s entire novel endorses the old madman’s point with all the secret force of which the language of art is capable. ‘Art’ is the operative ...”

“... hero, Duckworth Drew, whose name rhymed with his own and whose appearance matched his own self-image – ‘unobtrusive, of perfect manner, and a born gentleman’ – is first found outwitting the French Foreign Minister by offering him a cigar ‘drugged with a solution of cocculus indicus’. But after the entente, Le Queux was quick to switch ...”

“... over the last years. The charge of ‘crimes against peace’ was made to look its hypocritical self when someone, perhaps from a larger secret service, slipped a copy of the secret protocols of the August 1939 Soviet-German pact, with its details of the planned annexation of the Baltic states, into the hands of Hess’s defence lawyer while he walked the ...”

“... for anything useful, mainly because anybody who could submit himself to such absolutism had to be self-selectingly obsequious. But nowadays you can build an impregnable career out of polite waffle. If Professor Booth wants to be worried about something, he should worry about that. He should turn his attention to the sociology of academicism. Nobody objects to ...”

“... him; that she was a valuable member of the community and would be able to pass on the benefit of self-awareness to many, many others in the course of her life. Geoffrey was an excellent, kindly, caring husband, everyone agreed: a little older and slightly more wise than his fellow students; a rather stable Marxist, as opposed to a wild Trotskyite or ...”

“... and produced as ‘conceits’ by the ingenuity of the author, in order, in some deeper self-indulgence, to admire them and celebrate their unexpectedness as ‘realities’. Thus an external referent – the contingency of the inspiration (or Einfall) – is drawn inside the work and made to seem organic and inevitable. We have already seen Grass ...”

“... provisions into law. Not only do they go beyond the current (unlawful) practice, they are also self-evidently contrary to constitutional principle. It is tempting to think, however, that the changes proposed in Part III of the Police Bill do not matter much because, even if enacted, they will be struck down, either by British courts or eventually in ...”

“... seems to have quietly slipped away. The plague, Camus’s narrator remarks, was losing ‘its self-command, the ruthless almost mathematical efficiency that had been its trump card hitherto’. Mathematics flattens. It is a killing art. Counting humans, alive or dead, means you have entered a world of abstraction, the first sign that things have taken a ...”

“... hundred years.) Cromwell was so shattered by this debacle that he made one of his retreats into self-communion. Why had Providence abandoned him in this great endeavour? Typically, the answer he came up with was not that the expedition was a grandiose non-starter, and appallingly managed – all the objections Lambert had made in council. No, God had ...”