“... witch-hunting glee and life-devouring incomprehension had made the country swoon with piety and self-righteousness. Some years later, when the boys’ case was brought before the European Court of Human Rights, the judges expressed themselves baffled by the trial, its rapidity, carelessness and showiness; it was, they said, a trial which risked ...”

“... Say what you will about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be ...”

“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... is the means by which people seek to be conscious of themselves. It is that relationship between self-consciousness, or subjectivity, and sexuality that we want to explore. Few people today would subscribe to Brillat-Savarin’s ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,’ but a translation of this dictum to the field of sex does command ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... body language, the poreholes in strawberries, cottonseed and cheesecloth. This poetry neither is self-consciously caressive of country matters nor uses its images to point to emotion or despair. It seems satisfied and sensible, with no origins in either personal or collective crisis – such things have been taken in its stride. Plath is of course a very ...”

“... of doom and epic feuds and ancestral violence, where human lives weren’t shaped by civilised self-acquaintance but by what he darkly called ‘powers we pretend to understand’. The ‘categorical question’ at stake is, as the title of one of Auden’s poems put it in exemplary fashion, ‘Which Side Am I Supposed to Be On?’The dilemma had ...”

“... lift each other in a tentative balance, was advanced both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened ...”

“... points out, ‘all the faces suggest the same even and unruffled temper, a complete command of self coupled with a sociable ease in the presence of others’; and while certain gestures may suggest the sitters are about to speak, as a rule they appear ‘more inclined to listen’. The sitters almost never seem to speak, either, in the other genre of ...”

“... a certain vagueness to the reality of the texts. In any case, the fact that Duras and her husband, Robert Antelme, joined the Resistance in 1943, and that Antelme was arrested and deported to Buchenwald, made any worries about her early novels seem less pressing. I now think that my own will to preserve the faint aura of mystery surrounding early Duras at the ...”

“... in the personality of his subject. He accepts the account of Rhodes’s restless mind given by Robert Rotberg in The Founder (1988), which remains compelling even if some of its psychoanalysis now seems forced (Rhodes has middle-child energy and is locked in an ‘oedipal struggle’ with President Kruger of the Transvaal). Rather than fleshing out ...”

“... which would really be more accurately described as a decade and a half of abject self-prostration. Such empire as the Americans have had never of course depended on colonisation, a category disallowed by their own ideology of origins. It depended on something more novel, and ambiguous: the self-colonisation ...”

“... Australia, created by a Labor government ‘to help the sons and daughters of the working man’), self-education (he called his intellectual autobiography A blacksmith looks at a university) and afforestation. Three of his children passed through the University but the fourth struggled at school and was exiled (‘Dad didn’t believe in failure’) up to a ...”

“... whose work has done more perhaps than any of the others’ to shake the coherence and conscious self-certainty of the modern liberal self. The omission of Marx and Lenin is a different matter. Holmes is quite explicit about the need to establish a distinct category of ‘non-Marxist anti-liberalism’ and I think he is ...”

“... means or another. Despite the many who hated him, he died in bed. For I refer, of course, to Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister from 1722 to 1742, architect of the Whig supremacy, hammer of the Tories. His long tenure of power reminds us that Britain’s much-vaunted two-party system has in the past often given way in practice to something approximating to a ...”