“... Jung ascribed to Hitler, is probably worse, and probably less probable. For those familiar with Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, the question is whether we’re in the hands of the existential-fool murderer Moosbrugger or the supercilious and beguiling industrialist Arnheim. But why choose? We should consider the possibility that Trump and his ...”

“... to know yet cannot not know, something that must be disavowed, save in the secret closet of the self.Characters caught up in exactly the same story form the basis of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The old man leaves the money to his niece so that she can ‘meet the requirements of her imagination’. The phrase belongs to the old man’s ...”

“... filthy puterfaction, Our meat and drink were made, which bred Infection.The job of John Taylor, self-styled ‘water-poet’, was to keep the waterways clear. Gruber von Arni paints a grim picture of a Council of War overwhelmed by having too many people dependent on it, too few resources and waves of typhus and plague. Treatment centres were set up in the ...”

“... of his ‘experimental geography’ draws on the precedent of the ‘site-nonsite’ artwork of Robert Smithson in order to respond to Fredric Jameson’s call for a ‘cognitive mapping’ of advanced capitalism. In the process Paglen also suggests a model of photography that turns the influential account of Roland Barthes on its head: rather than the ...”

“... without dogma; art without indulgence: it was all a bit strenuous, and a touch of complacent self-importance was never far away. Reading him in bulk, one registers a somewhat heavy, upholstered, Second Empire feel to much of his prose. It wasn’t, to put it mildly, marked by playfulness. Speaking as the Voice of Reason and Science apparently doesn’t ...”

“... fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice him. Spade has failed to understand that a corridor is less a space than a channel of communication through which people, things and messages pass in both directions. Mind the traffic.Roger Luckhurst’s ambitious and ...”

“... project of global empire-building or geopolitics, globalisation today reflects the varied and self-conscious political or economic projects of national élites and transnational social forces pursuing often conflicting visions of world order. Moreover the institutionalisation of world politics has transformed the politics of contesting and managing ...”

“... the writing of A Small Boy. Thus in his immensely useful compilation, A Henry James Encyclopedia, Robert Gale maintains that William is ‘the hero of James’s autobiography, especially its earlier parts’. James had himself indicated as much when he first discussed a ‘family book’ with William’s heirs during the months, stretching to nearly a ...”

“... the details of his battling life became publicly known and he was sanctified. The image of poor self-sacrificing ‘St Charles’ has been a hindrance ever since.‘We have waited a long time for the definitive full-scale scholarly biography of Charles Lamb,’ Jonathan Bate asserts on the back cover of Eric Wilson’s book, ‘but now it has arrived.’ In ...”

“... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others – is ...”

“... provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter’s national security ...”

“... breeding in men’s souls knavish and tricky ways, it renders the city faithless and loveless.’ Self-sufficiency, autarkeia, was always preferable, trade at best a necessary evil. Only Pericles, according to Thucydides, had positive things to say about an open commercial society: The greatness of our city brings it about that all the good things from all ...”

“... have cribbed from: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction.’ ‘“Identity” became a synonym for “safe space” in which alikeness rather than difference could be explored.’ Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about Billie Holiday, ‘Songs for a Coloured Singer’, is called out ...”

“... This theory is a step towards the right answer, but taken alone it is absurd. Joyce was a self-important man, as he needed to be, and he had described Stephen in a book title as a portrait of himself when young: he would not trivialise the character without warning, in a continuation. Actually, the book confronts Stephen with a grim necessity: for a ...”

“... Wagner transcriptions on the piano to drown his despair); Frau Tuzzi’s self-deluded love for the Prussian financier and polymath Paul Arnheim; the poet Feuermaul’s flatulentverse. But the ferocity of these attacks argues for the importance of what is being defended. The experience of soul is made central to Ulrich’s intellectual ...”