“... namely, you. Ethics, however, Peter Singer begins his argument by declaring, transcends individual self-interests. Indeed, he locates the early stirrings of ethical thought in what he calls ‘the “Golden Rule” attributed to Moses’, which ‘tells us to go beyond our own personal interests and “do unto others as we would have them do unto ...”

“... unremarked by Anglo-American opponents who assume that no Frenchman has ever paid attention to a self-respecting ‘logical’ argument.) The operative concept is that which distinguishes ‘proper’ from ‘common’ names, the former marked out by the fact that they refer directly to some unique individual (person, object or event). With common names, on ...”

“... lady he cherished on Earth.Throughout his life, Dante engaged in an audacious project of self-exegesis and self-correction. The Vita Nuova anthologises his earlier lyrics and frames them in a prose narrative that supplies formal criticism as well as autobiographical context. It also reveals Dante’s deep ...”

“... at St Columb’s. Hopkins’s ‘whole theology of suffering’, his determined enunciations of self-denial, also echoed Heaney’s ‘mother’s situation … doomed to biology, a regime without birth control, nothing but parturition and potato-peeling’, ‘toiling on in the faith that a reward was … in heaven’.The religious sensibility that led ...”

“... theatre built on a similar brutalist scale to the National in London but with less of its self-effacing eagerness to fit in. Or rather I saw Hamlet not in the Ivan Franko Music and Drama Theatre but under it. The theatre’s ambitious artistic director, Rostislav Derzhypilsky, had discovered that beneath the public areas of the building there was a ...”

“... a political celebrity. He discussed the ‘Negro Question’ – the question of Black people’s self-determination – with the ‘big Bolsheviks’, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Trotsky, and travelled the country educating the Soviets about Black people in America. (His book Negry v Amerike, published in the Soviet Union in 1923 but not in the West until ...”

“... intellectuals who followed Norman Podhoretz from the ranks of the liberal Left into reactionary self-bowdlerisation. For them American power is sacrosanct. In the 1960s V.S. Naipaul began, disquietingly, to systematise the revisionist view of empire. A disciple and wilful misreader of Conrad, he gave Third Worldism, as it came to be known in France and ...”

“... one vigorously advocate the idea that the Israeli occupation is brutal and wrong, and Palestinian self-determination a necessary good, if the voicing of those views calls down the charge of anti-semitism? To understand Summers’s claim, we have to be able to conceive of an effective anti-semitism, one that pertains to certain speech acts. Either it follows ...”

“... gun to his head but been unable to pull the trigger, thereby generating further grounds for the self-loathing which had driven him to his desperate act. Desperate and sinful: suicide, even attempted suicide, perhaps even the stagey simulation of possible suicide, is a sin against the Holy Ghost, and although Greene, who converted to Catholicism when he was ...”

“... It was a gender-blind, ‘talking family’. Being clever and opinionated was rewarded; conceit or self-pity were as obnoxious as referring to anyone by their colour. Dinner-table rules that surely shaped Gellhorn’s journalistic principles included ‘no gossip or hearsay but everything reported from personal experience’. She lost no time in acquiring this ...”

“... Midlothian’ and ‘Young Mortality’ – as yet unwritten accounts of the country’s vast self-pity, arrested development and the way out of that – we are served with another ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Patriot’. Ascherson must know that Scotland does not live by the remnants of grandeur alone, it lives by lies, by lies stronger than ...”

“... Rick Moody’s The Black Veil is the latest voyage to the bottom of the sink, a journey of self-discovery jinxed by dense fog and treacherous syntax. Moody is best known for his novels, Garden State (which is being released for the first time in the UK to piggyback on the publication of this book),* Purple America and The Ice Storm, and his short-story ...”

“... the whole text thus reduced cries out to be allowed to expand, to grow up, to have its whole self back again.’ His strongest objection, however, is to Theory’s rancorous contempt for humanism and the human subject. Cunningham is well-read and committed, and he lands some solid punches, but it’s impossible to stick with him for long because he ...”

“... prediction or prophecy; it is often quick and concise knowledge of the future in the service of self-protection, even though one doesn’t always know what the danger is, nor what it is about oneself that might be harmed. And, perhaps above all, one must first have been drawn to something or someone – noticed them, picked them out, felt something in their ...”

“... too great. In other words, there was an existential as well as a felt political need to bring one self into harmony with the other, for as the debate about what had once been called ‘the Middle East’ metamorphosed into a debate between Israelis and Palestinians, I was drawn in, ironically enough, as much because of my capacity to speak as an American ...”