“... slipped quietly out of life at a time when it might have helped to convert the unemployed into the self-employed. Art has gone the way of religion. We are not more content because of this: we are more divided because we have experienced little radical redistribution of our wealth. The white savages of Britain have renounced the missionary teaching of the ...”

“... rounded and had a long, vertical window stretching almost from the ground to the roof. It was a self-consciously odd design, intended, it seemed, to attract attention. – How can the wall curve? I want to live here, it’s a good house, better than Eddie’s but no swimming-pool. I hope it’s empty, I hope no one’s there, no one will be there on a ...”

“... British governments on atrocities in Peru as well as the Congo: He is a man without any trace of self-interest, without any political or professional ambition. He was extraordinarily generous. He had a set of values that were both very strict and based on solidarity. At the same time, there is the man who appears in the diaries, the mysterious Roger ...”

“... of the later 19th century furiously denounced Marx’s ideas, or more accurately, those of his self-proclaimed followers, as an expression of the Jewish heritage he himself had ignored. It was Marx’s ‘passionately irreconcilable, uncompromising and intransigent nature’ that had ‘the deepest and most resonant appeal, and has generated the sharpest ...”

“... that includes ‘many social currents’: among the issues it champions are the Kurds’ right of self-determination, the emancipation of women and opposition to Nato and the IMF. Many of the SDP’s founders were members of Kurtuluş, a group active on the left before the 1980 coup and prominently mentioned on the recent banners in Taksim Square. Like most ...”

“... who had ‘missed his vocation’. This wasn’t a judgment easy to square with Churchill’s own self-assessment that he ‘adopted quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe’, leaving reason and evidence to mop up whatever was left over. If sycophancy was one of Lindemann’s skills, another was summary. He knew how to condense ...”

“... alone in Manhattan after running away from prep school, tormented by the ‘phonys’ and the self-absorbed, like the schoolmate he calls ‘about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat’. The Glass family stories are very different. They’re all non-stop talkers in the Glass household, a family of super-smart kids who have read everything, who starred ...”

“... the EU as a kind of bulwark, a halfway house between isolation and globalisation that allows a self-image of openness to the world but has the potential to keep the world’s big non-European powers, state and corporate, at arm’s length.I confessed to Boys I’d taken a peek at his Twitter feed. The header photo is a picture of his yellow Lotus sports ...”

“... Dawkins’s The God Delusion. I feel in the mood for an encounter with some bracing plain-spoken self-evidently true atheism. I suppose I can be accused of a form of superstition, in that my wish to avoid reading something superstitious has led me superstitiously to crave something with no taint of superstition, however faint! Amusing. My session is this ...”

“... the magazine, nor did he acknowledge that with this leak Moreau’s group was acting with as much self-interest, and as little regard for the consequences, as Moreau had accused the CIA of doing. The officer explained that it was understood by all that the scandal would unravel in public very quickly, and Congress would get involved. ‘Our goals were to ...”

“... to benefit most from this situation. The FLN’s control of the export-import process, and its self-serving ways, eventually became known as the ‘import-import’ scam. By the middle of the 1980s, the groups of young men in the cities were larger, dowdier, a touch more intimidating – and by 1986, with the collapse of oil prices, there was even less for ...”

“... the two sides of Axiom V to coincide in sense, which would indeed make it, not merely true, but self-evident, as an axiom ought to be. If this were so, it would be one of the identity-statements which can be explained without appeal to the sense/reference distinction. Sluga cites in his support a passage from ‘Function and Concept’, but fails to explain ...”

“... often reduced to a series of repudiations’. Part of what’s repudiated here is any song of the self that sits in isolation from the variousness it courts. The line-ends say it best: in the shift from the hypothetical coolness of ‘one’ to the more vulnerable gambit of the first person, and in the double life of that person himself (‘one of each ...”

“... with chapter endings that are just shy of cliffhangers. Its early pages seem to reflect a younger self – words such as ‘castigated’ put me in mind of a bright middle school student – and the adverbs pile up: ‘Slowly, dejectedly’, ‘painfully and begrudgingly’. There are some unfortunate flourishes: ‘My sexual spark had been crushed like a ...”

“... to Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (first published in 1969), in conversation with his second self, Lee Russell, who wrote film criticism for the New Left Review from 1964 until 1967. Russell’s reviews are also included in the volume. The conversation is quirky and illuminating, with Russell playing the straight man, the practical critic, the ...”