“... first reading of Black List, Section H was Stuart’s ability to deal with the notion of a damaged self, someone who was clearly weak, clearly wrong and who felt nothing but contempt for the world around him. I had come across these anti-heroic attitudes in other books, but this was an Irish self, and a man I had met, who ...”

“... to female narcissism, this is a Christian morality tale intended to warn against the sin of self-love. Karen is cast out of her community and her church; she has her feet hacked off, and the story ends with her repentance. What we remember, though, is not the final image of her blissful reunion with God but the red shoes, with the little feet still in ...”

“... software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word ...”

“... drug, LSD. (In 1951 he had asked Harold Abramson, a physician on his team, to supervise him in a self-experiment with the drug. Gottlieb reported ‘an out-of-bodyness … a sense of well-being and euphoria’.) Some of his colleagues were interested in the potential effects of dispersing it on the battlefield, but Gottlieb believed LSD was the drug most ...”

“... a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self. I became a revisionist, luckily, just as the word was coming into vogue; it was a term of abuse used about historians who were peddling anti-nationalist views of Irish history. The most seriously revisionist text, however, to appear in those years was John ...”

“... evangelical activity which we habitually associate with Puritan opposition. It was a surprisingly self-confident church, too. In its infancy, under Elizabeth, its very survival had been doubtful. The improvised combination of Calvinist theology and episcopal government had seemed frail and eccentric. But as the decades passed, the morale and the standing of ...”

“... and a vigorous force on the folk music scene.) In 1935, the year of the general election, Robert Conquest stood as the Communist candidate in the mock election at Winchester and Frank deputised for him during the campaign. Some of the teachers were happy to see the boys thinking along these lines – or thinking at all about the drastic turn that ...”

“... political landscape, the nation and national pride bulk ever larger, bolstering our sense of self-worth, tickling up our resentments. This emboldened nationalism has a weather-beaten old ally in the shape of the popular newspapers, which are jubilant about Brexit, not without reason regarding its achievement as largely their own work – ‘yes, we did ...”

“... all doubled up as art critics. (The bullish Courbet took on both tasks: doing the work and the self-promotion.) It helped that there were extraordinary new artists to support, as well as a hulking and immobile target to attack: the annual Salon. The Académie des Beaux-Arts organised it, controlled who and what was shown, awarded prizes and public ...”

“... he forgets what he has done. When his opinions are ingrained they are immovable. In another self-serving anecdote for which Cohn must be the source, Woodward reports this circular exchange: Several times Cohn asked the president, ‘Why do you have these views?’ ‘I just do,’ Trump replied. ‘I’ve had these views for 30 years.’ ‘That ...”

“... grandmother, now had the time and energy and position to put it about that she was descended from Robert E. Lee. She became, like Hughdie, an Episcopalian. Jackie and her sister Lee had two mansions in which to cavort during their teenage years. Their status, however, was precarious. In the summer at Newport, for example, only Hughdie’s real offspring had ...”

“... a politics of one or another kind of ‘national socialism’. In order to avoid a return to such self-defeating strategies, the International Monetary and Financial Conference of the United and Associated Nations at Bretton Woods in 1944 agreed to restore stability with a new kind of gold standard, to recover prosperity by means of freed international ...”

“... is a forbidden transgression that is also a universal fact. He draws a transgressive moral from Robert Musil: ‘The many sexual combinations exhibited in The Man without Qualities testify to the great truth that all knowledge of the other, all intercourse between opposites, is analogous to carnal knowledge. It is an idea ready for political ...”

“... society exists to serve the economy, and not the other way around. True, the Secretary of Labour Robert Reich and other members of the Clinton Administration have rather suddenly taken to criticising the mass firings on the part of major corporations in general and of AT & T in particular (40,000 initially budgeted for, later reduced to 18,000). But at the ...”

“... media professionals for interviews, too. From the newspaper sector, only the British journalist Robert Fisk and I were chosen. ABC News, Channel Four and CNN, whose producer Peter Bergen spotted bin Laden’s importance early on, also accepted. Over the years, so did several Arab and Pakistani networks. The BBC and CBS declined, Atwan writes, out of lack ...”