“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they feared a salaried state medical service that would deny them the financial opportunities of self-employment. State intervention, Clegg argued, was ‘something essentially harmful to medicine’, the only way to counter the widespread support for the NHS was to launch a virulent witchhunt against Bevan. A plebiscite of doctors was planned for 31 January ...”

“... feel itself doomed to be at permanent odds with almost half the population, and would not go into self-destructive paroxysms every time it failed to get its own way. The result might be a stable, enduring settlement commanding majority support among both communities. Is this likely? Almost certainly not. Trimble has been praised for signing the Good Friday ...”

“... of intelligence. Some social success was obviously necessary, but so was a deep reserve and a deep self-esteem. He found Joyce to be ‘a quiet but rather dogmatic man’ who had ‘(as I am convinced most superior persons have) a sense of his own importance’. And Eliot was certainly a superior person. It happens that the letters have little to say about ...”

“... Canary Wharf: He looks as if he might have been. He exudes that combination of aloofness and self-satisfaction which invites bullying. I can imagine wanting to smash his glasses in the playground. I can even imagine wanting to do it now. But what I think I would really like to do now would be to get somebody to hold his arms behind his back while I grasp ...”

“... case. But if he can, then Clinton should have refused to waive his ordinary right against self-incrimination. If, for over-riding political reasons, Clinton had to accept being deposed before the grand jury, Dershowitz adds, he should have appeared in person rather than allowing himself to be videotaped, knowing that the video would probably be releas ...”

“... had read about in London in the 1910s. But those were later developments; and they were elaborate self-deceptions with which Pound rationalised his continuing support for a regime whose moral bankruptcy was increasingly apparent. They were not what had sparked his initial interest, as he acknowledged in an unpublished essay of 1933: ‘I bet on Italian ...”

“... Sometimes the cult worked better than one would expect. Like many survivalists it wanted to be self-contained. It made its own guns and, I think, its own bullet-proof vests. We have a report here of a young man who was told to learn how to work as a magazine printer and book-binder. So he worked for a few months in a print shop, and learned his trade. Then ...”

“... Had I put on the recording myself the spell would have been nowhere near as powerful because self-induced. Why this should be I can’t think, though doubtless Proust would know.7 September. Alan Clark dies. I never met him, though I saw him once in the street, noting then that he shared a walk with Denis Healey, both of them swinging their arms ...”