“... not ‘consent to any abridgment of the rights of American citizens in any respect. The honour and self-respect of the nation is involved.’ At stake was ‘the very essence of the things that have made America a sovereign nation. She cannot yield them without conceding her own impotency as a nation and making virtual surrender of her independent position ...”

“... was the classic 20th-century Mitteleuropean sensibility: deracinated, sophisticated, ambitious, self-doubting, hungry for experience, politically engaged, and racked by despair. Born into the comfortable if emotionally suffocating world of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish bourgeoisie, he saw the world of his childhood destroyed, and was never again able to find ...”

“... of them. Merton’s first example – in retrospect a poignant one – of what he called ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ was a run on a bank: a rumour that a bank is about to fail causes depositors to seek to withdraw their funds, making what was actually a sound financial institution unsound. Alone among the commentators on LTCM, Dunbar notes Merton’s ...”

“... and Guinevere. There are storyettes about knights and foxes, and Paolo and Francesca, and a real self-parody of a framing story about a girl who fakes a set of male genitals with a tulip and two bulbs. There’s a recipe for Salsa di Pomodori (‘Serve on top of fresh spaghetti. Cover with rough new parmesan and cut basil. Raw emotion can be added ...”

“... twin sisters, not doing well at school, seeking escape in solitary writing. Irritable, charmless, self-conscious and endlessly introspective, Nina was Auden’s frowning schoolgirl dying to be asked to stay. She particularly hoped for boys’ attention, but even girls’ friendship was hard to achieve. Nina didn’t like being a girl: she wanted to be a ...”

“... taken for granted, he can thank his awesome productivity, which he compares in his autobiography, Self-Consciousness (1989), to his psoriatic over-production of skin, and the sheer availability of his personal life and voice in novels, articles, television appearances and interviews. Though he is an intensely intellectual writer – his early novels undertake ...”

“... that inspired Ebenezer Howard and his moral-religious moonshine about rehousing the nation in self-sufficient towns of 30,000 as to be almost fair to him. He digs out the many roots of Howard’s mission, notably its debt to Henry George’s single-tax campaign for land reform, popular in its time, forgotten today. He seems half aware that the garden city ...”

“... fantasists are too solipsistic, these figures are too relentlessly outward-looking for corrective self-scrutiny. Bernard, like Joe, loses the woman he loves, accused by her of being obsessed with rationality at the expense of emotion. McEwan’s first two novels thrived on the contrast between the scrupulous clarity of his writing and the resonant oddness of ...”

“... Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.Dawkins, who is as ...”

“... very interestingly, a shift in Milton from an early belief in the plain intelligibility and ‘self-sufficiency’ of scripture to a later belief that scripture requires careful interpretation. With a nod to Derrida, he calls the factor of interpretation a ‘supplement’ and then concludes, with characteristic exaggeration, that respect for scripture as ...”

“... Meet the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Gef the Talking Mongoose and, more prosaically, Doug and Dave, self-confessed manufacturers of crop circles. Thrill to ‘penis panic’ – five dead in Benin. If that’s too culture-specific, consider joining an epidemic of mass-psychogenic illness: dizzy spells and vomiting seem to be international in their appeal and ...”

“... The modern Republican Party was born of revolution. In the early 1960s, right-wing insurgents – self-consciously using the model of Communist cells – took over the GOP, repudiated the moderation of its leaders, among them President Eisenhower and the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and built a formidable counter-establishment infrastructure that ...”

“... stopped-up bowels, Jewish angst and mother-woe, revived and inflamed accusations that Roth was a self-hating Jew, an enemy of his own people peddling filth. ‘Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favour, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass – I happen also to be ...”

“... us. Something says nonstopare you hereare your ancestorsreal do you have abody do you haveyr self inmind can you see yrhands – have you broken itthe thread – try to feel thepull of the otherend – make sureboth ends arealive when u pull totry to re-enterhere. A ravenhas arrived while Iam taking all thisdown. In-corporate me itsquawks. It hopscloser ...”

“... too non-specific for relevance. It was November when I made these notes, then in absentminded self-disgust set out on the path from Crail, and by sunset, at four, could neither return nor make Kingsbarns before dark. Though no one knew where I was, real danger lay elsewhere. No cows even. Just sleepless fields staring skyward and the firth prowling ...”