“... which his attention to the non-human world represents apparently grows out of Simon’s previous self-centred fetishisation of meaning: ‘I’m expecting the Significant Thing in my life to show up, the vocation,’ he says, recalling James’s too-passive hero in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. But the novel, though disturbing, doesn’t merely mime ...”

“... the PLO which would insist on the national rights of the Palestinian people as well as Palestinian self-determination. Vance said that the US would immediately recognise the PLO and inaugurate negotiations between it and Israel. Arafat categorically turned the offer down, as he did similar offers. Then the Gulf War occurred, and because of the disastrous ...”

“... of rabbis and licensed moneylenders to the Habsburg emperors, and remained contemptuous of her self-made financier husband. She had been brought up in Vienna, for which, like many similarly placed ladies from the provinces, she yearned throughout her life. To annoy her and as a sign of protest against her attempts to cultivate a Viennese salon in ...”

“... years past. The Treaty recognised the whole of Ireland as a unit to be accorded sovereignty as a self-governing Dominion of the British Commonwealth a year later, albeit with an option for the six north-eastern counties to quit this new all-Ireland state within one month of its establishment, by the vote of a majority of the Northern Provincial ...”

“... history can say something definite, but not trivial, about this subject. Not only academic self-respect but, in a sense, the self-respect of 20th-century Western attitudes at large are tied up in the question. If ‘Victorian’ does not correctly connote a special point of view about sex, at least one prevailing ...”

“... was always a whacked-out right wing to make bellicose liberals look moderate.) In the self-congratulatory atmosphere that enveloped American public discourse after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kennan’s doctrine became the key to what in retrospect seemed inevitable. One problem with this account is that it leaves out Kennan himself. Almost ...”

“... Neoliberalism​ is often conceived as a system of self-regulating markets, shrunken states and crudely rational individuals. Early neoliberals, however, didn’t believe in markets’ self-correcting properties. Instead, as Quinn Slobodian argues in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, they were concerned above all with establishing governments, laws and institutions in which markets could be embedded in order to make them work as they should – not only at a national but at a global level ...”

“... large, these scholars were middle-class or upper-middle-class, the children of academics, doctors, self-made businessmen. If they were posh, they were interestingly so, like the brilliant mathematician and future Fields medallist Timothy Gowers, whose father was a composer and whose great-great-grandfather had been a famous neurologist. Or they came from ...”

“... Eva indulged in ‘monotonous whining monologues’ that Larkin characterised as ‘resentful, self-pitying, full of funk and suspicion’. But it was precisely the viciousness of this circle that produced its opposite in Larkin’s poetry, which combines his father’s penchant for the controlling lapidary utterance (‘Life is first boredom, then ...”

“... reading a biography so utterly abstemious in critique and evaluation, so wary of the minor self-aggrandisements that accompany the biographer’s possession of and by his or her subject. Most biographies amount to a celebration of the triumph of mind over matter. This one opens not beside the cradle, or at the distant root of some genealogical ...”

“... strict Reichians, pornography fostered masturbation, which locked the individual in a self-reinforcing loop of diminishing returns.) Tynan experiences an epiphany at a live show in Hamburg, where he, wife Kathleen and another couple spend a lovely evening watching a young ‘mutually affectionate’ couple copulate on stage. For some obscure ...”

“... Tell me​ your mystic and I will tell you who you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author ...”

“... like the rest.* Maybe. But no other writer in this field so regularly startles one into self-recognition. We skitter anxiously from cradle to grave like a tart between lamp-posts. I won’t make you feel bad so long as you don’t make me feel bad. That is the social contract. And there is nothing much to be done about it. Goffman’s work, as he ...”

“... we begin to suspect Byron of sharing. Yet Byron made a loyal friend, to men at least. The self-absorption conveyed by Byron has been exaggerated by the insistent style of Raphael’s narration and by the one-sidedness of his interests. On Byron’s short-lived and disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke, Raphael is in his element, as a ...”

“... an island even if it isn’t one physically – in its atypicality as an Indian city; in its self-containment and complex extremes of wealth and destitution. Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai in 1996, after the Shiv Sena Party, in an alliance with the BJP, came to power in Maharashtra (the state whose capital is Bombay), and the permanent leader of ...”