“... feeling included. Successes and achievements and triumphs, like winning at the Olympics, may be self-deceiving. Popular and successful social events may be the kind of thing one doesn’t want to be part of. Or one may not have been part of them without realising it.Two months after writing about the Olympic champion, Kafka, who was himself a keen ...”

“... problem: it only arose from a misunderstanding of what he meant by sympathy, on the one hand, and self-love, on the other. But still, the problematists weren’t wrong that some central elements of Smith’s mind pointed in strikingly different directions, so that, say, sentimentalist and utilitarian admirers could equally find encouragement for their ...”

“... a plan to make the world ‘safe for democracy’. Inspired by Wilson’s advocacy of national self-determination, Ho sought an audience with the US president, hoping to persuade him to use his new influence to restore Vietnamese rule in French Indo-China. He carefully quoted from the US Declaration of Independence in his petition. In Manela’s more ...”

“... said, that can explain why in the last three hundred years or so we in the West have become so self-consciously liberal; liberal about thought itself, the conviction that prompted Nagel’s book, and liberal in our morals and politics. For most of the known human past this hasn’t been so, and we can’t say that our ancestors were benighted or ...”

“... than a class party, and the trade unions had incorporated themselves into the polity by their self-abnegating contribution to the war effort. But the actual changes accomplished by Clement Attlee’s administrations were more ambiguous than the new terms of debate made them sound. Civil society and private industry had been left largely unreformed, and ...”

“... countrymen, who seemed to have a talent for revolution but no corresponding talent for self-government; more broadly, its target was every anxious liberal who sympathised with the political and economic aspirations of the less favoured members of society, but feared their predilection for dictators, every liberal whose instincts were ...”

“... of disciples in the Lower Fourth, the really superior person, not saint, not sage, but outcast, self-abandoned. Waugh had the same school-world dreams in social form, and they continue to exercise a fascination – crude, perhaps, but potent. His popularity shows, among other things, how those with the instinct to opt out have a keen relish for opting in at ...”

“... also a risky, flamboyant, long-sustained star performance, complete with pratfalls and buffoonery, self-mockery and self-castigation. Anything she dishes out she is more than ready to take; and as a performer, she has never shirked making an idiot of herself, or washing bloody knickers in public. The querulous critic can be ...”

“... to feel. In this null condition, he does not distinguish between Doctor Ransome, the Brownlow who self-sacrificingly protects him, and the Fagin-like American seaman, Basie, who loots his way through the course of the novel. (Jim first encounters Basie ripping gold teeth from Chinese corpses.) Jim somehow survives internment, death marches and a final bizarre ...”

“... bringing workingmen’s colleges and settlement houses to the underprivileged, and thence to the self-consciously virtuous, studiously unintellectual, pattern-cut products of the public schools. Alfred Tennyson’s Uncle Charles, convinced that his family was descended from the Medieval d’Eyncourts, devoted his patrimony to converting a modest Lincolnshire ...”

“... he finally produces an image of that kind of Englishman with which, as MacDiarmid saw, his later self can be at ease. It is not that Sherston was either A weak or a cowardly person. It is rather that his rebelliousness was only Superimposed on his profoundly English nature. Sherston’s Progress completes the image which first appeared in Memoirs of a ...”

“... had possessed the native cynicism of Leigh Hunt himself, or – a rather different kind – of Robert Bloomfield, the rustic poet who in 1804 had been paid nearly £4000 for his two little volumes, he would have ruined his gift but he might have made big money. As it was, his best things are so good because they were not the things he wanted to do. The ...”

“... southern Argentina. And he is certainly not the embodiment of Indian aspirations for justice and self-realisation: ‘After several hours we were forced into conversation with the only other white people on board, the only people we could talk to since the wary Indians offered no more than monosyllabic replies to questions from outsiders. In fact, these kids ...”

“... and how do we make descriptive and prescriptive distinctions between the inalienable components of self and the commodifiable bits of not-self? What are the rights and values pertaining to this ‘we’ whose configuration advances in biomedical science require us to decide on and even to enshrine in law? Who can alienate ...”

“... Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style ...”