“... a Social Science (1958), which stresses that Evans-Pritchard had given an account of a coherent, self-sustaining way of making sense of the world, one which ensured that belief in oracles would seem rational. These two interpretations imply two quite different answers to the question of whether understanding magic is compatible with believing in it. Thomas ...”

“... concepts and language shows that she’s aware of that. But her characters are living in a self-imposed anachronism. Their situations have been created by choice. Other options have been – and to an extent still are – open to them, but it takes them a long time to realise it. Kate Bain, of The Men and the Girls, gives up a difficult but ...”

“... there anything you would wish to do differently if you had your life over again?, with the rueful self-stricture, ‘Use fewer semi-colons’; and the narrator of Beckett’s Watt is wrung to a small sudden flat remonstrance: ‘How hideous is the semi-colon.’)The conventions of Elizabethan printing are here charted and illustrated: with a single lunula, to ...”

“... takes her revenge with a spirited patter song, indignantly denouncing the King as a ‘conceited, self-indulgent libertine’ and seizing the occasion to inform him in – absentia – of ‘certain goings on around this place/That I wish to tell you I do not admire.’ I do not like polygamy Or even moderate bigamy (I realise That in your eyes That clearly ...”

“... destructive, if not sadistic, acts. The younger girl, Mary Bell, was equally pretty but eerily self-controlled and thought to be the more intelligent and influential of the pair. Bell was found guilty on both counts of murder. She was described as ‘psychopathic’ and ‘very dangerous’. Referring to the second murder, she said in the open, adult ...”

“... that toad down there is me. Corbière’s wingless toad-poet knows how to aggravate his self-disgust into a more generalised disdain. Verlaine, who was the first to write about Corbière, called him ‘le dédaigneux par excellence’. It was a tribute to the superlative quality of Corbière’s manner, but it doesn’t tell us the whole story of ...”

“... the steps by which the IRA might have conceded continuing partition: British recognition of Irish self-determination would allow the IRA in turn to recognise the self-determination of Ulster Protestants within Ireland.Was peace long delayed as a result of Protestant stubbornness? Unionist constipation should never be ...”

“... the film as an adrenalin rush, a rollercoaster ride of carnage. We may empathise with the victim self-destructively, enjoying his and our own distress. Or we may switch allegiances, and side not with the victim, but with the killer who (apparently) suffers nothing. It’s a feature of undergraduate essays on film that they routinely celebrate whoever is ...”

“... of more than four hundred declarations of war from the late 16th century to 1939 reveals that self-defence and the enforcement of treaty, international or succession laws were the reasons cited most often by states. In addition to permitting frequent armed conflict, the lawful status of war had other consequences for international relations. Since force ...”

“... may be fought. It is distinct from the law governing when wars may be fought (the jus ad bellum of self-defence and the UN Charter). Also known as the ‘laws of war’, international humanitarian law traces its origins to 1859, when the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino and initiated a movement that became the ...”

“... to return, and it took the acuity of Ronald Syme in History in Ovid (1978) to perceive the self-assertion and protest behind the screen. Ovid knew that in Augustus he was dealing with a reader paranoid enough to beat any postmodern advocate of a hermeneutics of suspicion, but cumulatively over the years he constructs a narrative that reproaches the ...”

“... poem with Derrida’s employment of concepts sous rature’; and ‘the Commedia is a foray into self-consciously “virtual reality”.’ On religion: after the invention of printing, ‘it became easier to feel that you had “finished” the Bible as you might finish an Agatha Christie, and correspondingly easier to think of the sacred writings as like a ...”

“... gradually to be learning to let it all hang out, and as the hippy pop of the 1960s gave way to the self-indulgent ‘progressive’ rock of the 1970s, he published a memorably terrible two-line tribute to Jefferson Airplane: The music comes and goes on the wind, Comes and goes on the brain. With the 1980s came The Passages of Joy, containing more free verse ...”

“... teleology, or accord such prominence to genealogy. Today even the toreros, once paragons of self-made Spanish manhood, mostly issue from a privileged handful of matador or rancher lineages. (Dynastic dementia: until recently, when a bull was smart enough to kill a man, the dam was slaughtered in an act of genetic misogyny.) But perhaps it’s because ...”

“... a more public-spirited, Confucian version of the Protestant ethic – to the 19th century’s self-congratulatory belief in the West’s ‘civilising mission’, Huntington and Harrison have discovered that the West can keep on congratulating itself – not this time on its exportable civilisation, but on its particular culture. The disparity between the ...”