“... of an unreliable witness whose claims are to be duly cross-questioned and judged by some higher, self-validating discourse of truth. But reflection on the status of the courtroom officials suggests that this authority of law (or reason) may be exposed to further complications. To inquire where the ultimate verdict derives from – the quaestio quid juris of ...”

“... had a peculiar accent: ‘Perhaps Polish Jew?’ Deborah Baker suggests that it may have been her self-consciousness about her accent that caused Riding, many years later, to talk about poetry as a place ‘where the fear of speaking in strange ways could be left behind’ and ‘as a way of speaking differently from the untidy speaking ways of ordinary ...”

“... merely the establishment of areas of life which governments and laws must not enter, but political self-government or (what Skinner apparently takes to be the same thing) political equality. Berlin, suggests Skinner, was mistaken in taking himself to be carrying out a ‘purely neutral task’ of ‘philosophical analysis’. Rather, he was endorsing a view ...”

“... bystanders who had been stressed beyond endurance by events and become ‘pusillanimous and often self-tormenting’, lapsing into ‘a dark despondency of the soul alternating with terror or rage’. Pinel, the first in the emerging profession of psychiatry to speculate on the effect of revolution on a nation’s mental health, was confronted with a paradox ...”

“... each other’s souls,’ Lord Charles Beresford said. Their children, buoyant on champagne and self-belief, were the first to turn against them. ‘Their minds are almshouses [for] outworn notions and wrinkled phrases,’ Raymond Asquith, Margot’s stepson, sneered. ‘We do not hunt the carted hares of thirty years ago. We do not ask ourselves and one ...”

“... but surpass it when the war was over, going on to gain world fashion dominance with its noble, self-respecting styles. Never a word appeared about what the clothes should look like; no analysis was made of which shapes, colours and textures or ways of composing and wearing them might make German frocks eclipse Paris frocks in the postwar world. Guenther ...”

“... buried in this catalogue.’ Gates has helped black studies to progress from what he calls a ‘self-esteem machine’ to a serious and valued discipline and his latest achievement is to put the obscure manuscript he bought at auction into the US bestseller lists. What Gates discovered in the Swann Galleries’ list was almost certainly the first novel ...”

“... as ‘the principle of individuation’: that is, as what makes any particular thing its unique self. The form of a table, its having legs and a top, is universal, common to all tables; it is the timber from which it is made, Porter explains, that made it this table for early thinkers. But Aristotle was far from sure of this. The difficulty is that matter ...”

“... with anxiety. They are concerned when machines do what we want to do; and they have species-self-doubt when machines do things that once defined what it was to be uniquely human. The worst worry is that the machines will refuse our orders, that they may acquire a will of their own, and want free agency. You start out with some matter-of-fact ...”

“... didn’t feel up to working, and at times could be charming, funny, informal. She admits a rather self-congratulatory fondness for him as he struggles against artistic extinction, while reporting back to us on his need to pee half a dozen times a night: he often had a urinary infection for which he drank an infusion of cherry-tree bark. It’s also worth ...”

“... in those who made it. The guilty included not just Chamberlain but also a whole generation of self-serving men whose unpatriotic notion of Britain’s world role reflected a general political grubbiness. These men were mostly Conservatives, so this was a very serviceable myth for the left, but also for the new, postwar right, some of whom hoped to ...”

“... altruism were motives for the provision of free inoculation to the working classes, but economic self-interest was just as much a part of it.What caused smallpox? What were its patterns of distribution? What were the real rates of its morbidity and mortality? Physicians and philosophers disagreed over these questions and many were dissatisfied with the ...”

“... of Lawrence or Flaubert, for whom the medium of the letter seems to fill a need, not for mere self-expression, but for some larger exercise of the personality in exasperation or enthusiasm, in that almost instinctive enlargement of reaction to things which others find in unmotivated physical activity. Benjamin was, on the contrary, a person of the ...”

“... Pico was a scholastic, and he defended medieval university philosophy against the eloquent, self-consciously innovating humanists who were his friends and lovers.Pico never delivered his Oration. And it turns out that this most famous speech of the Renaissance isn’t really about the dignity of man at all. It’s about destroying personhood in pursuit ...”

“... no law saying that anyone has to read these books, and the pain suffered by doing so is entirely self-inflicted. Still, it seems a pity that so few cricketers try to write their own books. Cricket is the most introspective team sport, for reasons which mainly boil down to the amount of time the game takes. That must be one of the reasons why cricketers are ...”