“... hands of the champions of repeal, by making them sound principled, and their opponents whiny and self-interested (this is what Norquist was playing on in his Holocaust rant). Similarly, it didn’t help trying to explain that ‘double taxation’ was nothing to get excited about, since it was so commonplace (the same individuals can be taxed on ...”

“... account of his brush with death, I feel shaken again: as if my fairly innocent adolescent self is sitting on some huge prehistoric monster stranded on the rocks with a pale blue sky behind it. But that’s not quite right; the wrecked ship isn’t just something used and past: it’s like looking at the disasters, mistakes and accidents that are all ...”

“... a cross-fertilisation from which escape is impossible: the global village, in other words – not self-conscious cosmopolitans playing at being villagers, or scheming to become shamans of the largest imaginable community. This is why Attali’s ‘world spirit’ is bound to manifest itself as esprit de paroisse, as well as in resonant proclamations of the ...”

“... imitations of Versailles all across western and eastern Europe. But it was most vivid and most self-conscious in post-revolutionary France: Paris, capital of the 19th century. In Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, Paris was the centre of fashion, of luxury industries, whose Universal Exhibitions were places of pilgrimage for all Europe: the marketplace of ...”

“... community, common life, are valued by the hero only so far as they are able to sustain the true self in the secrecy it needs. To the extent that we decide that Chekhov and his hero resemble each other, we can be sure biographers will never reach the truth about his relations with women. As Yegorushka’s double vision of Solomon indicates, romance in ...”

“... absolutists. Many who had preached and even practised individual rejection felt that this was too self-centred and co-operated with others in the search for means of preventing war. The former conscientious objector might join the No More War Movement, but he recognised no contradiction in joining the League of Nations Union as well. Yet the basis of the ...”

“... Culture has to admit, is that many Elizabethan authors wrote books specifically appealing to the self-consciousness of merchants and craftsmen ... Thus, even if there was no large middle class such as Wright described, there were bourgeois hero-tales, and there were tradesmen who could read them.’ (Wright’s sin seems to have lain only in seeing the ...”

“... takes over? At this point our sociologist-historian-critic must surely wish to intervene with a self-satisfied Holmes-to-Watson smile: ‘Stylus virum arguit. Style shows a fellow up. I am sure you must have noted, my dear Watson, that every writer has his own catchwords or bosswords. Take Yeats. I was reading his Wind among the Reeds last night. I found ...”

“... modern politics. The government research laboratory is an intermediate social habitat, not quite self-sufficient in its traditions or its mission, lying across the boundary between the very different domains of academia and the Civil Service. The sociologists of science have given their attention to its academic characteristics: in what way is it an ...”

“... e Folclore, which funded much of Dina Dreyfus and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s early research. The self he had inhabited in 1927 embarrassed him, but the diary is both charming and exacting precisely because it is a record of his inhibitions and reticence, his lack of the multitudinous capacity he desired:Departure from São Paulo. I bought an enormous bamboo ...”

“... 1982.) Alexis is also a violinist, and his playing reaches new heights as he emerges from his self-imposed silence. Improvising on his instrument soon after his son is born, he begins ‘to comprehend that liberty both art and life have when they obey only the laws of their own development’. Yourcenar is saying that our lives can become our own with ...”

“... the armistice. All there was to that was a brief meeting between Professor Louis Rougier (a ‘self-important and meddling provincial academic’) and Churchill, who had vainly hoped that a French visitor might have some inside news about the Montoire encounter.Two other feeble arrows in the defence quiver were the ‘secret telegrams’ Pétain had sent ...”

“... were ‘suffering high levels of inactivity’. He promised schemes to ‘give them the self-esteem and confidence they need to hold down a job’. Those who did not step up would be punished with the loss of their benefits: ‘It is not unreasonable to require people to take up that opportunity.’Re-elected once more in 2005, Labour proposed ...”

“... dependent on her for the financing of his pleasures. His wife, Liliane, was intensely puritan and self-denying, the survivor of a childhood of stark poverty in the Auvergne. Life there was much as it had been in the Middle Ages, with people living off chestnuts, cabbage, potatoes and lard. She was almost comically at odds with her husband’s values – if ...”

“... wrote of the encounter. ‘The pleasantness of his face freed me of all thought of my personal self. I felt like a child in the presence of one with great wisdom and much love, and I became very humble within myself … from him was radiating a feeling of infinite understanding and kindness, with supreme humility.’Huge if true. By way of ...”