“... 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 ...”

“... in Staying Alive – well, most of them – don’t need any assistance. If you ignore the huggy, self-help element, it’s a very good anthology indeed. Poets, happily, are less likely than editors or publicists to make claims about the power of poetry to do good. Auden and Marianne Moore (whose poem ‘Poetry’ begins: ‘I, too, dislike it’) both ...”

“... a graceas final as that fault line in the mindwhere wildernesscomes slanting through the glintof self-deceit and guile to claim its ...”

“... modest estimates of France’s genetic continuity. Although at times the creature of a national self-image, he was never a captive of it.Where do these retractions leave the quest for the identity of France? In the last and longest part of his work, Braudel develops the elements of another approach to it, more serious and less congenial to collective ...”

“... boldness and ardour that had a high romantic voltage: yet there was also a deeply modern guilt, a self-castigating intelligence which stuck like a hook in the throat of rapture. The love begotten by the heart is a love that dances in its chains when it embraces intellect – love of the scrutinising brain. And the stone that’s always broken by the ...”

“... out of, say, Gibson Street and into Woodlands Road to buy a pint of milk. The time, energy and self-importance needed to place oneself world-historically by resort to proper names is a time-wasting luxury activity. You just turn the corner and go down the road and, released from having to worry about your Place in the global sense, are free to notice more ...”

“... Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is victimised by Carol, the ultimate female intellectual mediocrity who gets her revenge on his patronising didacticism by turning him in to the university tenure committee on grounds of sexual impropriety ...”

“... could say – a new method of imagining that one does not live for ever. For it presents to the self its own death and life. Holmes’s ending has a good deal of the quiet intensity of Johnson’s own life of Savage. ‘Finally I should say that if my book strikes some curious chord in the reader’s mind, it came to me on such a night ... in the city, when ...”

“... cynicism to mind, but Eça’s characters, unlike Flaubert’s, taste the bitterness of genuine self-knowledge – though they soon forget the taste again. In the agony of his eventual separation from Amelia, Amaro sets out to write her a poem in the lyrical form that he remembers from his student days, but all that he can manage is two stanzas: ‘It ...”

“... aroused in them by the work of their predecessors. The Victorians, she reminds us, already self-consciously thought of themselves as ‘modern’, and they were as obsessed with the problems of the subject, of representation and of the status of language as the 20th-century writers who followed them. Armstrong does not cite T.S. Eliot’s celebrated ...”

“... oral roots and point to a range of elaborate rhetorical displays which make much of conspicuous, self-advertising tropes as well as innuendo, illogical leaps, systematic lying, focus on a word’s sound rather than its meaning, ‘needling’, talking ‘around’ a subject, parody and pastiche. The dozens, or the ‘dirty dozens’, also operates as a kind ...”