“... a moral turn, not least inside the Dutch Reformed Church, which fatally undermined the regime’s self-confidence? And was not that turn inspired by the example of Mandela in the ultimate non-violent situation, banged up on Robben Island? What about those equally startling velvet revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, or more recently in Burma? Most ...”

“... though the occasions have passed. Shaw, like Keller, is aggressive, provocative, an unashamed self-presenter (in Shaw’s case self-promoter too, though of course not as musician); both are outrageously biased and flamboyantly exhibitionistic. The differences are that Shaw is wide-ranging, intellectually ...”

“... unshy predictions as to the revolutionising of American letters. Kerouac was never one to be self-effacing, but neither was he slow to praise the fluttering genius of his pals. ‘By virtue of my youth and enthusiasm and fire,’ Jack writes to Sebastian, of their friend Ian/Yann, he has been reborn: perhaps! But by virtue of his weary knowledge, his ...”

“... at the age of 31. Faulks also suggests that they lived and died in the shadow of war. This is self-evidently so with Hillary, while it can be plausibly argued that the slaughter of the Great War was a determining element in Wood’s background and that the Cold War contributed to Wolfenden’s early death. The trio differed in their sexuality – Wood was ...”

“... set trauma on a new course. And psychoanalysis reciprocated the favour. Not only did analysts like Robert Jay Lifton and Bruno Bettelheim help construct the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case of a traumatic event that could not fail to leave ‘a trace on the individual and collective memory’, they also developed a clinical entity, ‘survivor syndrome’ or ...”

“... then. Phew.’ Phew, and indeed, gosh. He’s less passive about other things. Except for sex, the self-conscious rock and roll wild man is always ready to make his mark. When Robert Stigwood failed to pay up after a series of concerts, he got trapped on a staircase and kneed by Keith 16 times, one for each grand owed. Not ...”

“... spoilt beyond redemption. The second son, the Duke of York who became the reluctant king, was the self-effacing naval officer hampered by an acute stammer. Of the younger two, Gloucester was a solid military man and Kent another playboy. More promiscuous than his elder brother, he was the good time who was had by all, including, it was said, Noël Coward and ...”

“... to face her in round two – but voters, especially on the left, were taken with this argument. Robert Hue, a former general secretary of the Communist Party, and Patrick Braouezec, a charismatic reformer, called on party members to vote for Macron in the first round, rather than Benoît Hamon, the winner of the PS primary, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the ...”

“... concentrate on gun safety and environmental awareness – and those who bought their guns for self-defence, and had no interest in ever leaving Washington. You know who won.One of the things Johnson wanted, and blamed the NRA for not letting him get, was a national registry of all the guns in the country. NRA lobbying was still in its infancy, but when ...”

“... says, in ‘a race to the bottom driven by ever-receding profitability’. The Nazi politician Robert Ley said that ‘there is no longer such a thing as a private individual.’ Half a century after Ley’s suicide at Nuremberg, Morgan, as editor of the News of the World, ensured that this was the case in Britain. Every parasite has its parasite. Every ...”

“... half-way through Swallow. Most surprisingly, the tone of the narrative is wryly comic and often self-mocking. It’s an unexpected treat after the sledgehammer jokes of Summit and the lecherous self-pity of Dreams and Hallucinations. Thomas’s comedy begins with his fictional characters demanding equal billing as authors ...”

“... or humility towards movies’, as making ‘only a cynical show of superiority and self-importance’. In the title essay Wenders deplores the incapacity of modern audiences, indulged and debased by the hollow consumerist ethic such criticism reflects, to appreciate the beauty of John Ford’s Westerns; he is pained by ‘the increasingly ...”

“... is that the new state would be truly transitional towards the practicable limits of its own self-dissolution into the associated life of society as a whole.’ But this marked the end of his early expectations. By then, he knew that Régis Debray had been right: the events in France in 1968 announced a voyage to China which, like ...”

“... two hundred years it has been impossible to speak of nationalism ... socialism and democracy, of self-determination for peoples and nations, of government by law and of the belief in human rights ... of ‘the people’s’ demands, of ... ‘secular’ education, political propaganda and the state’s role in promoting ‘enlightenment’, of popular ...”

“... The colour shots are very striking, in a Tokyo-printed, fat-magazine kind of way; that slightly self-conscious excellence of serious investment lurking behind a noble topic – ‘Life’, ‘Time’, ‘Nature’, one of those single-name enterprises. The gourmet layout freezes your attention for a moment, but then you have to keep the pages flicking to ...”