“... and he was 34. The local church recorded their deaths as ‘Mord und Selbstmord’ – murder and self-murder.Their graves, by the edge of the lake, are now a tourist attraction, enhanced by an immersive audio experience inviting visitors to contemplate the many unknowns that surround their last days. Depending on your degree of cynicism, their relationship ...”

“... the weekdays could be as much moral as religious. Franklin’s paper-technology invention for self-improvement took the form of a table of thirteen virtues, from temperance to humility, and seven days, from Sunday to Saturday. He marked his failures to practise the virtues on the chart, day by day, and gave special attention to one virtue each ...”

“... on other arts. The depth of this influence reflects Wagner’s own versatility, and modest self-perception as an Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Beethoven rolled into one. At the start of the 20th century, as Ross puts it, Wagner ‘was like a massive object in space, drawing some entities into its orbit, making others bend just a little as they moved along ...”

“... colours, I imagine mine would be ginger.’A socialist and a Dreyfusard, Renard was both a self-styled outsider and a consummate insider. After a rather unpromising start in Paris, where he worked as a journalist, poet and dramatist, he attained financial security when he married Marie Morneau in 1888. The following year he became the co-founder and ...”

“... was Mayakovsky’s fatal error: ‘Like Strelnikov in the novel, he succumbed to a belief in the self-created rhetoric of his own dynamic function in society. That society needed him and benefited from this rhetoric is obvious.’This principle even extends to the relation between the poet and his poems:In the post-epilogue book of poems we find that Zhivago ...”

“... test to see which would win out when her personal convictions came into conflict with Scotland’s self-determination, that was it.Forbes’s conservative supporters seem to think that she should be given a Get Out of Jail Free card: it’s not her fault, it’s her faith and that of her community. Underlying this is a theological ‘blackboxing’, as if ...”

“... in Europe will only disappear when the Soviet Union becomes a stable democracy. For that and other self-evident reasons I favour the retention of nuclear weapons and an adequate fighting force. What I am suggesting is that we should be thinking in more radical terms than we have since the war about the new meanings of defence, diplomacy and security. Our first ...”

“... word cist (‘clean’) after it fell in April. And the unhygienic militia which did the job, the self-described Chetniks of the warlord Voytislav Seselj, also freely used the happy expression. The ‘camps’ which were the inescapable minor counterpart of this process have at least served to concentrate the flickering European and American mind upon a ...”

“... reports about the sins of the medical establishment, The American Way of Birth seems both tame and self-serving: ‘tame’ because the scandal is by now familiar, and ‘self-serving’ because it is used to validate one particular narrative of childbirth – that of Mitford herself. Her book begins with an account of the ...”

“... Derrida, de Man, Hillis Miller – bring in gloomy reports on their reading, and the gloom is self-perpetuating, I agree, but I can’t see that a close reading of their books would find evidence of the glib levitation that Smith represents. There is, too, an ideological question. Critics who attack Eliot, Joyce, Yeats and Pound for the alleged ...”

“... Pope’s outsider status, a product of his Roman Catholic faith and his physical handicap, some self-proclaimed New Historicists have slandered him as an apologist for such establishment vices as colonialism, which he explicitly and powerfully deplored. With such enemies, Pope did (and does) need friends. His correspondence records scores of relationships ...”

“... hearing about for years?’ and then disappear under the hay again. It strikes me that Groucho’s self-interpretation of looking for a needle in a haystack undertakes to transfigure the coarse genre of farmer’s daughter gags into a search – almost hopeless, with just room for good spirits to operate – for a heart’s needle of pleasure somewhere within ...”

“... To limn the details of my situation I’ll reach into my past, adopt the system     Of self-portrayal – I know, no innovation –     Yet still the true strange ground of most creation. You always thought that kindly diagnosis Begins by looking at the child’s neurosis, So I hope you’ll pay attention. I was born     In Cambridge; both ...”

“... he is well aware of the significance of ‘collective worth’ for the humiliated masses who seek self-esteem in denigrating others. In extreme cases, such as Germany after Versailles or much of the Arab world today living in the shadow of Western dominance and the weaponry, of proxies, a paranoid nationalism sees the entire outside world as a gigantic ...”

“... the classical style once proclaimed the independence of art, it has been reintroduced as a form of self-deprecation rather than self-assertion. The revivalist impulse common to fundamentalism and post-modernism is thus in neither case a simple return to the past, for in the aftermath of the modernist redistribution of the ...”