“... Since 1990, the economy has shrunk by 30 per cent, shattering the late Kim Il Sung’s dream of self-reliance. His son, Kim Jong Il, holds the reins of power in league with the Armed Forces, and both need the food aid to maintain their positions. The United States, not for the first time, is substituting ‘humanitarian assistance’ for foreign policy. Is ...”

“... in Letters Concerning the English Nation, was the country of religious toleration, robust self-government, vibrant commerce and advanced ideas. Montesquieu’s dithyrambic praise of the English constitution in The Spirit of the Laws, like Diderot’s for Samuel Richardson (‘O Richardson, Richardson ... I will keep you on the same shelf with ...”

“... radicalism of the agents who flourished in the spring and summer of 1647 than to the intruded, self-righteous and mutinous idealism of the Levellers. The agents ‘always spoke out of their own experiences as soldiers, and mainly about the grievances of soldiers’. Yet by the autumn ‘unstable’, ‘excitable’, ‘violent’ men were to be found ...”

“... of government; and both were extremely careful to do exactly that. In business terms, their self-defined role was that of the chairman of the board rather than chief executive. That had the effect of systematically transferring the burden of responsibility to their subordinates. When presented with some government error or misdeed, Eisenhower and Reagan ...”

“... called Skink Tyree, a Vietnam vet liberal, who chooses to live on road kills, a swamp rat whose self-presentation is somewhere between Kris Kristofferson (in one of Peckinpah’s more unbuttoned ventures) and Gary Snyder. Neat prose to surf in short sharp bursts, each cross-cut segment with a hook in its tail. Impotent fantasies aimed against the ravages of ...”

“... combines a Nietzschean dissection of marital power relations with the sunny optimism of a self-help manual is very American and a little strange, but that women get less out of marriage because they need it more is an important insight. Does it follow that if women need marriage less they’ll get more out of it? Since ...”

“... solitary crossing of the desert, the painful abandonment of the ‘seduction theory’, the heroic self-analysis, the tearing away from the transference on Wilhelm Fliess, the stoicism in the face of his colleagues’ attacks.It is a nice story, but we now know it to be nothing but a vast ‘legend’ (Henri Ellenberger). One after another, historians of ...”

“... Morgan’s death in 1913. ‘In time little will remain except the feeling of bewilderment that a self-ruling people should ever have allowed one man to wield so much power for good or evil over their prosperity and general welfare, however much ability and strength and genius that man possessed.’ Morgan’s good fortune began at birth – in 1837. The ...”

“... everything else Stevenson wrote, has never stopped being subject to the rigours of his readers’ self-defining critiques. Everyone has a view of Stevenson. His father said he was ‘stupid looking’. Edmund Gosse said he was ‘as restless and questing as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry ...”

“... were as defiantly countercultural as hippies and peaceniks. Together, white Southern Democrats and self-confessed conservatives shaped the social agenda of conservative Republicanism. The aggressive certainties of Republican foreign policy originate in a further defection from the Democrats. In the 1970s it was followers of the Democrat senator Henry ...”

“... forces of the Ministry of the Interior, in particular, thereby accelerating the creation of local self-defence organisations. The general picture is one of linked militias and armed groups, operating in what is aptly described as the ‘ghost politics’ of the new Iraq. The shadow state has effectively been revived, but in a devolved ...”

“... Jew, and so rhetorically reproduces the schism within Jewish culture and politics between the self-loving and those who are not. Arendt is clearly opposed to a Jewish nationalism founded on secular presumptions. But she doesn’t find a polity based on religious grounds any more acceptable. A just polity will extend equality to all citizens and to all ...”

“... an unusually reflective activist, and defeat seems only to have sharpened his mind. He writes with self-deprecating, rueful wit about what some might view as his quixotic involvement with Israel’s anti-Zionist left. History hasn’t followed Matzpen’s script for permanent revolution in the Middle East, and Warschawski, chastened by events, writes that ...”

“... setting that is not, however, despised (any more than it is in Whitman). It shows Walser’s self-aware, occasionally prickly poverty, his rough desire to please in the context of his independence, his extreme civilisation paired with his extreme wildness. All his life, it seems, he had a relish for the human animal, writing with notable, undissembled ...”

“... Penelope ‘This family life is not for me. I find it leads to deep depression And I was born for self expression.’* Gouine, as Quinn points out in her note on the poem, is a French slang term for lesbian that gained currency in the 1920s and 1930s. It may have derived from the fashion for dressing up in male evening dress in beau monde lesbian circles ...”