“... rebellion be, as the images of disorder in Arcadia testify. The two writers know how prone to self-deception is the human heart. In the new Arcadia Amphialus draws up a manifesto whose arguments for resistance might have been penned by one of Sidney’s Continental friends – only for Sidney to condemn the ‘foul treasons’ behind the document’s ...”

“... took to jolt us out of the state of internal paralysis and overpowering depression. That kind of self-deafening is a psychobiological defence mechanism against insanity. But all it takes is one flash of light in the darkness for those who have passively and apathetically sunk into collapse, waiting only to hit bottom, to rise again. With their fall into ...”

“... for legal constraints, there are always lawyers who can be hired to change them. This is a proud, self-made man who has known lots of humiliation in his time, and the power of money is the only way he understands of gaining, if not respect, then recognition – especially from the City and Tory Establishment: it was Edward Heath who stigmatised Lonrho as ...”

“... for a woman. ‘For patience, for reliability, for real judgment in carrying out directions, for self-control,’ Taylor was to write, ‘give me the little woman who has not been “educated” too much, and whose ambition is to be a good wife and mother ... Such women are capable of being the mothers of men.’ Jean Strouse picks up the fact that Alice’s ...”

“... all others responsible for the privatising – or privateering – operations, should submit to a self-denying ordinance, like Parliament in the Civil War. There ought to have been the fullest guarantees that none of them or their families or hangers-on would benefit personally. No such assurances have been forthcoming. There has always been room in the City ...”

“... by the BBC at ten this evening. The papers, which have had a preview, are full of Leeson’s self-justifications, but nobody seems to question the propriety of broadcasting such an interview in the first place; and like so many of the interviews Frost is involved with it’s a pretty seedy affair. Not that Frost isn’t highly respectable but his rise as ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... emissary, Stafford Cripps, promised the Congress Party leadership that India would be granted self-government and dominion status after the war if it would continue to help the Allies win it. His mission failed – Gandhi called the offer a ‘postdated cheque drawn on a crashing bank’ – but Orwell did his best to soften the truth. In his broadcast ...”

“... Helm wants to put it in such stark terms. Sacrificing democracy for the sake of the planet seems self-defeating, since democracy is one of the things we need to preserve if we’re to have a sustainable future. Yet at any given moment democracy looks more like part of the problem than part of the solution. Helm’s answer is to take the long view: tighten up ...”

“... people – the vast majority of humankind at any moment – who can’t be talked into voluntary self-denial on account of their race. The potentially useful suggestion that ‘more black people here would be a good thing’ will not be heard where the grammar says ‘there are too many white people.’ Giddy with their deserved triumph in 2018, the ...”

“... Brezhnev, characteristically, did not blame his colleagues or saboteurs, but – after ritual self-criticism – urged his staff into such desperate efforts that the first blast furnace was fired up on time that June. He was forgiven: Stalin awarded him the Order of Lenin at the end of the year. ‘What attracted so many people to Brezhnev,’ wrote Roy ...”

“... form of curatorial management, organising chunks of text on a screen. The discerning scholarly self on which the humanities depend was conceived as the product of transitions between spaces – library, lecture hall, seminar room, study – linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interface with screen and keyboard, and ...”

“... of male speech – a kind of reverse Philomela.13What I’m pointing to here is a critically self-aware ancient tradition: not one that directly challenges the basic template I’ve been outlining, but one that is determined to reveal its conflicts and paradoxes, and to raise bigger questions about the nature and purpose of speech, male or female. We ...”

“... threats not just to established and relatively comfortable working patterns, but to traditions of self-reliance and control of work: the Boulting Brothers’ 1959 comedy I’m All Right Jack touches on this. The most interesting essay in the book, based on surveys of workers’ attitudes, is by the sociologist Mike Savage: interesting in part because it ...”

“... the new worries brought by Nazi oppression slipped in beside the old worries of a man for whom self-doubt, hypochondria, pessimism and anxiety were lifelong constants. When the Nazi Government in one of its first acts expelled Jews from public employment, a category which included almost every academic post in Germany, Klemperer was considered one of the ...”