“... they were built to sustain have cracked and crumbled. The most influential modern biography of the self-styled ‘Louis the Great’, Pierre Goubert’s Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen, presents the King as a man whose thirst for glory led the vast majority of his subjects into a condition of ‘primitive, anarchic wretchedness’. Modern historians ...”

“... of what matters to those who believe foreign affairs matter to their lives, Georgia seems minor: self-contained, complex, resistant to solutions. The argument for it mattering is not the so far relatively small loss of life, but the fact that it is an extreme but not wayward example of the particularist and defensive ethno-nationalism which is now becoming ...”

“... I have never mastered.’ Again, in a brief autobiographical note, she wrote of her much earlier self: ‘of me Mother was proud; the other one she loved.’ She sought love all her life, or wished to believe she did, but her self-absorption amounted almost to contempt for the love of others. Still, not liking Tsvetaeva is ...”

“... turned back from their descent and fled upward, had taken under a quarter of an hour. The self-accelerating fire had run fifteen hundred yards up the gulch in less than half an hour, the last eleven hundred yards in less than fifteen minutes. In the first half of the book, Maclean recounts the basic story, with digressions on the nature of ...”

“... Richard Feynman was the world’s number-one physicist (after Einstein), a well-known genius, a self-described ‘curious character’ who was involved in some of the formative events of 20th-century science: the Manhattan Project, quantum mechanics, the birth of quantum electrodynamics. Feynman’s mind roamed over every conceivable branch of Science ...”

“... paintings, novels, poems and plays. The main reason is probably media hype. A second is nostalgic self-indulgence – finding pretexts not to put away childish things. A third, perhaps, is semantic slippage, eliding the difference between ‘a culture’, in the anthropological sense, and ‘culture’ tout court. When millions enjoy something, the interest ...”

“... a spirit of one for all. Then younger members make their break, rebelling or deviating. The larger self of the family falls apart. Eventually, a point is reached where the youngest glimpses, as from Pisgah, the possibility of a fully individual life. Wild horses gallop, stars are apostrophised. It’s never a straightforward journey, these novels aver. The two ...”

“... artist’s social exclusion. The glimpsed conjugal scene is fixed in his mind, a mental snapshot self-consciously cherished, and his own exclusion spliced into the picture by a kind of internal photomontage: He would be there, sitting waiting, always, The woman always kissed upon her cheek, Her husband turning, moving to his stables Or wherever ... Here ...”

“... from other people. The social constraints the Medieval communal ideal and framework had put on self-assertion, if not self-interest, were progressively fraying. In the 15th century, they had started fitting out family side-chapels in the churches – already self-differentiation from ...”

“... that of Suckling or Herrick. Rochester’s is the voice of a man grown so familiar with his own self-destructiveness that it causes him no surprise. The very unstrained quality of his style makes his honesty the more chilling.’ The contribution by the editor of the volume begins with a consideration of the difficulty in distinguishing Rochester’s poems ...”

“... over a collection of dull, dim essays straining to articulate they know not what. The volume’s self-reflexive murkiness seems symptomatic of a more general malaise, and it is hard to remind oneself that it is simply the product of a small group of academics who have lost all touch with an audience and a society. It appears to express some deeper and more ...”

“... among the guilty men and Vidal’s tone, like Mailer’s, was shrill, vengeful and tremulous with self-regard. It was not that the reviewers had been ‘wrong’ about his book: it was simply that, in one way or another, because of something feeble or unhealthy in their personalities, they were not ‘adequate’ to cope with the full majesty of Gore’s ...”

“... that sort of way. And to turn the knife in the wound Sam had acquired such a lot of Wordsworthian self-righteousness, and if Sara spoke out at all would accuse her of being ‘narrow-minded’. Well, well. That was how it might have struck a contemporary, either then or now. Lyrical Ballads and Journals and things – their fame was all to come, and it was ...”

“... of other people’s intolerance, of those impatient to inflict their own disagreeable and self-righteous views (particularly when political or architectural) on others. Thus the people he most dislikes are puritans, ‘miserabilists’, Enemies of Pleasure, ‘propagandists of Virtue’ and their admirers, especially those who become tourists of a ...”

“... milk over soft white bread Late style here means spare fragments, scattered memories and some self-disgust. (In the US, ‘crèche’ means a Nativity scene rather than the place you drop off children.) Other new poems are lists, ‘slowly repetitiously’, as Rich admits, cataloguing reasons for outrage. She has a sense that she has said it all ...”