“... 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 ...”

“... the text and the text is decomposed into the several acts of power discerned by an omniscient if self-destructive reader. However deep the tensions and contradictions which O’Brien finds in the ‘melody’, he finds them also in Burke; and it is a consequence that they existed because of the complexities of ‘it’, and of Burke’s attitudes toward ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the sorrow written on his brow, pleased if we care to read between its lines? Every man has his self-image. He sees himself as One of the Old Stock. Some members say he is a snob. He is. Some say he is a prig. Not really. A prig is a man who sticks pedantically to his principles. Lennox has no principles, except survival. He is a popular member – greeted ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by the activities of ambitious individuals thrusting their views upon him whilst a stagnant, self-protecting bureaucracy stands by and watches. Hamilton Jordan tells of his negotiations over the hostages with a secret and unnamed Iranian (he was surprised when he met him to find that he did not drink wine and wondered whether he was anxious not to seem ...”

“... as we shall see, would be to endorse the view that Scepticism is true and to invite the charge of self-refutation. Sextus thinks of his Outlines as a ‘narrative’, not as a demonstration, of Pyrrhonism. The Sceptic, he writes in a famous passage, is like the painter Apelles. Frustrated at his failure to depict the foaming mouth of a horse, Apelles flung ...”

“... how these things happen. The Truce was written 14 years after If This is a Man: it is a more ‘self-conscious’ book, more methodical, more literary, the language much more profoundly elaborated. It tells the truth, but a filtered truth. It was preceded by countless verbal versions: I mean, I had recounted each adventure many times, to people at widely ...”

“... adopt a consistent policy, which would be difficult, or could drop its global rhetoric and windy self-righteousness, which should be easier. So all the propositions on which the Netanyahu polemic is based are false, and there is no case for an Israeli-led Western crusade against ‘terrorism’, with Mr Shamir, perhaps, as its commander-in-chief. The US is ...”

“... first time, and Barthes’s solemnity here looks more and more like a deadpan act, or a feat of self-discipline, or perhaps both: Buster Keaton at the semiologists’ circus. There are two new collections of essays by Barthes, first published in French in 1982 and 1984, and both now translated; and there is Susan Sontag’s anthology, which first saw life ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The first is a realistic if undemocratic fear, since changing them is our right; the second is a self-aggrandising fantasy in which attempts to alter the status quo are seen as madness, hysteria, mob rule. They often assume that we can’t handle the data in a crisis, and so prefer to withhold crucial information, as the Pennsylvania government did in 1979 ...”

“... that rests squarely on justice itself, but in general the project of justice is not given to self-limitation. There’s no reason to think that markets will prove a more enduring way of organising production than, say, feudalism. At present, though, in the face of the market’s dominance, theorising about justice seems a bit like trying to do origami in ...”