“... empire thinks itself superior, deserving or generous (or all three at once); but Adams saw that self-deception as well as cruelty was a danger of ‘all the wars of interest and intrigue’ (he means all wars except those of immediate self-preservation or rebellion against despotism). Wars generally are driven by ...”

“... past can be eradicated. What he can’t see is that this wishful thinking is precisely the kind of self-delusion that he takes to be characteristic of religion. That’s because it is a kind of religion. In his yearning for certainty, Christopher is merely replicating the intolerance and taste for indoctrination that he professes to despise among the ...”

“... look filled me with longing.The little girl in the picture became my secret sister, my other self, the pretty child I was – inside – in spite of my stout and clumsy outside and, at times, my ugly convict skull (the remedy for lice was shaving the head). Like many children, I was a changeling – not the right shape or temperament to belong to my ...”

“... against exploitation’, were ‘our allies in the struggle for a new society’ and must be given self-government at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, the war itself was ‘part of a world revolution of the common man, aimed at a new world of plenty and security’. Paul Addison, in Now the war is over, an excellent book derived from a good TV series, sees ...”

“... utterance, with the tiniest flicker of an eyelid or the slightest suggestion of a thought – a self-regard and obsession with the self usually only available to religious novitiates, madmen or very young children. Fame, with all of its fleshly temptations and attendant despairs, is an obvious incitement to ...”

“... and inferior person’. His secret hope was to be somebody else. The romance of Jung’s second self, his ‘Personality No 2’, would later dominate his remarkable memoirs, composed in old age with the assistance of Aniela Jaffé and at the instigation of Pantheon’s Kurt Wolff in one of the great publishing coups of the century. But neither Wolff nor ...”

“... la sacra, y Sevilla la grande. Liverpool the impoverished, the liverish, the void, the full, the self-besotted, the blarney-argoted, the blitzed and blackened, the bella-brutta, the rag-rich, the moss-stained sandstoned, the green-lung’d, the ricket-ridden, the loud and adenoidal. Liverpool the last-to-be-served, the least-accounted, the over-arched and ...”

“... people we would like to be, places we would like to go; on there being always an as yet unattained self. There is something we want, or think we need (hope, destination, not turning back, satisfaction), but because we cannot give up wanting it we have to redescribe the process of wanting, how we go about wanting it (if there is hope but not for us we have to ...”

“... Hardwick’s great subject was women – their subjection, their stoicism, their self-reliance – but she wrote about them with a sort of fatalism, a fatalism that characterised her treatment of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which she reviewed for Partisan Review when it appeared in English in 1953:Are women ‘the equal’ of ...”

“... that this fear was disguised, even from those who felt it, by publically-accredited rhetorics of self-reliance. Like the new historicists he admires, Leverenz has decided that self-fashioning is animated by forces outside the individual, that these are only superficially situated in specific historical events (Like the ...”

“... skin a kid rips from a smelly, smashed elder-branch? Now that the academies are switching into self-destruct and gibberwick I’ve fallen in love again with a rich old library and those darkblue bindings; I’m bending the knee now to letter and copy-text, the fine print of the ...”

“... was no other way of living, and for most of her life it didn’t make her much of one. A nude self-portrait begun in 1975 (she was born in 1900 so her decades are the century’s decades) shows a different grandmother figure. Her face is rather tight around the mouth, as a painter’s face can be when reaching a decision about just how a detail seen in ...”

“... the alternatives were probably worse. Without regular elections politicians would drift into self-serving cliques that pursued their own interests at the expense of everyone else’s. The only way to hold them to account would be to empower self-styled tribunes of the people to interrogate them before the court of ...”

“... emerged of poor food, unsanitary conditions, protests, mental health crises, hunger strikes and self-harm (there are similar reports from Penally, a former army training centre in Pembrokeshire which is being used to house Iraqi and Iranian asylum seekers, and RAF Coltishall in Norfolk, where around forty Iranian and Iraqi asylum seekers have been held ...”