“... remarked in this paper, memoirs and confessions are still to some extent separate genres, then it may be said that a conviction of his own good fortune is the distinguishing mark of the memoirist. The memoirs of famous sportsmen, actors and television personalities seem constantly to be saying: ‘Look what a fortunate person I am!’ There are primitive and ...”

“... of its own categories are mysterious, if not invisible. This blend of the familiar and strange may explain our tendency to seize upon Japan as the very image of the contemporary. Having apparently jumped straight from pre-modernism to postomodanizumu, its culture seems both bewilderingly fluid and monumentally static. Even Baudrillard, it has been ...”

“... Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal; it is his nature to live in a state. Men and women may live in political communities, modern liberals have retorted, but there’s nothing particularly political in the nature or character of most people. In every society there are some who have a taste for politics, some who want to be rulers or representatives; but they are a tiny minority ...”

“... world wars. Is the Kadavergehorsam explanation adequate? That depends on what we want to know. It may tell us why German soldiers fought on tenaciously even when the war was self-evidently lost, or why economic life continued to function even under severe aerial bombardment. It may explain individual atrocities, such as the ...”

“... that great but mysterious poem, Wordsworth describes himself walking out on a moist, brilliant May morning. He is about to experience one of the numinous encounters for which he is famous – with another solitary walker, a derelict old man who makes his living gathering leeches from moorland ponds. Before that, his pleasure in the beauty of nature darkens ...”

“... poor things, felt forced to spend hours in educational pursuits in order to please him. He may even have been a child-abuser, ‘approaching’ his daughter Bertha. And Gertrude may have had similar ‘experiences’ with her Uncle Sol, though the details and documentation are not supplied. ‘All Stein wanted was to ...”

“... realm, is also a ‘delphic’ oracle, perhaps, looking towards a future when women as well as men may have the freedom to act both morally and according to their feelings; and when they will not be prevented from shaping their own destiny or shaping the world. As the story progresses through its historical time, signs of such a future begin to appear. Divorce ...”

“... consider a star biography as merely the linear tale of a performing life’s progress. Rather, we may use star chronicles as springboards for philosophical investigations, however careless and impromptu, into our own sightlines. The new biography of Audrey Hepburn, by Barry Paris, a writer already praised for his books on Louise Brooks and Garbo, is an ...”

“... US – is hard work. And that holds true for both sexes, though the one in shorter supply may well have the more arduous time. The subjects of Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society are fundamentalist Mormons, whose marriages violate both official church doctrine and the laws of the state; but the threat of persecution, legal or otherwise, seems ...”

“... paintings fall somewhere between the diagram (which can give information about the thing which may or may not relate to how it looks) and the photograph, which gives information about how it looks and may or may not give information about what it ...”

“... of a reactionary ideology, but this is too simplistic’; ‘the NFWI’s perception of womanhood may have been primarily domestic, but it was not a passive domesticity.’ It is difficult to see why the tone has to be so guarded. Andrews admits that the WI’s founders did not have overtly political ambitions for the organisation and that its executive body ...”

“... to obviate identification. Here is the chance for New York’s homeliest girl. Her misfortune may make a fortune right away. Somewhere in the archives of the Mirror, a masked Rosa Travers gazes out in muted triumph. Some time later, the new-model Rosa would, I suppose, have been unveiled. Unless the carbolic acid caused a third-degree burn, the scalpel ...”

“... who thought her a pedantic elaborator on natural scenery. By a few critics – whose vocabulary may have been less extensive than her own – she was resentfully branded an élitist poet, one whose poetry was not ‘accessible’ to the ordinary reader. Clampitt was aware of this criticism but put it gracefully by: ‘There are enough readers who get turned ...”

“... those discourses refer (or worse, the rejection of the very idea that facts exist or that one may refer to them).This is quite a programme, and undertaken here in an oddly roundabout way, since Sokal and Bricmont have chosen to take on the influential Parisians they regard as a prime source of the infection, rather than their infatuated surrogates on the ...”

“... inductions into the Armoured Corps of the Israeli Defence Forces took place on the mountain. It may seem a strange story to celebrate: a complete military failure, involving massive loss of life as well as death by suicide, which is especially problematic from a Jewish point of view, although as the men killed each other in turn, there was technically only ...”