“... More than culture or class conflict, war reached the people and compelled them to acts of self-sacrifice based on patriotic identification with country and government. ‘War is the health of the State,’ declared Bourne, disillusioned that the masses did not rise up in resistance. In the Twenties, the French writer Julien Benda continued this ...”

“... or at any rate made it plausible to claim – that independent-minded peasants and tradesmen, self-enriching and assertive, would shortly undermine all the Bolsheviks stood for. Plans were laid against the impending counter-revolution: hideous, impossible goals were set. Within five years, agriculture was to be collectivised and a massive industrial base ...”

“... portraits and monuments, Queen Victoria’s Secrets offers not so much an account of the Queen’s self-fashioning as an entertaining compendium of the conflicting guises in which the 19th century chose to see her. Victoria emerges here in all the infinite variety of a 19th-century Cleopatra – not just as Albert’s radiant bride or the reclusive widow of ...”

“... tendency that sees the scientific worldview as one myth among many. That this is nonsense is self-evident: when one set of fashionable posturings has given way to another, the fossils will still exist. The story the fossils have to tell is that our ancestry split from that of other African apes around five million years ago. These early hominids, best ...”

“... specialised in black lovers. But blacks were making and spending money of their own, and building self-confidence. They shared in what Douglas, again after Fitzgerald, calls ‘the terrible honesty’ of the decade. What this seems to have meant was the abandonment of restrictive social and ethical constraints and customs, a certain hedonism and, in the case ...”

“... sticky note stuck? No felt-tip scrawl saying ‘Debt to Murdoch is crippling,’ or ‘X is to Self as Self is to Amis’ or ‘vivid, charming, but lacking in force’? What, page 100 reached, and nothing done? Nothing to say, except ‘I am really enjoying myself’? Anyone who reads, let’s say, Joanna Trollope will ...”

“... he lost his head in every way, is itself a fine tale of desire and renunciation, idealism and self-deception, with – if we choose – the neat lineaments of myth. It has received a lot of attention lately, retold vindictively by V.S.Naipaul, operatically by Simon Schama. In this celebration of a possible Good Imperialist (good beyond the inherent ...”

“... that their neighbours might be doing so.’ Like many others, I kept hoping that mutual self-interest would prevail, forgetting that this wasn’t a situation in which anything so rational could be expected. ‘We don’t wish to live with them any more. We have to separate once and for all,’ one read and heard people say in Serbia, but nobody I ...”

“... on such slim evidence. At one point Gotlieb contrasts Meissonier’s supposed flight from ‘the self-referentiality that defines the history of Western painting’ to Manet’s attempt to ‘thematise’ modern art’s relationship to tradition ‘in his major canvasses of the 1860s’. It’s a promising comparison, but Gotlieb’s way of proposing it ...”

“... mysterious sequences leading to the heart of ‘the human predicament’, with unattainable love, self-consuming desire, the intertwining of past, present and future. The protagonists never know what has actually happened to them. Nor, frequently, do Duras’s viewers or readers. When she got control of a camera herself, her films became ...”

“... consequence to be a reductio, but I can’t think why. It is entirely plausible, indeed entirely self-evident, that there is a very great deal about how the mind works that we do not understand. Here and elsewhere, Dennett writes as though science is over and we know already what’s in it and what’s not. (‘Can’t we dismiss the whole sorry lot’ of ...”

“... artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were by Federal grants and corporate connections to the sciences. Moreover, in the wake of the ‘new economy’, pundits began to wonder what the ...”

“... mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s ‘real’ teenage self, missed the school bus. In that one remark the child encapsulated what the director and producers had got so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their gentle faithfulness throughout to the homely tone of the 1960s Spider-Man ...”

“... of Death, offers a more sinister vision of the ethics business, depicting bioethicists as a self-appointed corps of elite liberals plotting to take control of the American medical and judicial systems. Critical essays and editorials have recently appeared in magazines such as Wired, the Scientist, Commentary, the Weekly Standard and First Things ...”

“... stranger are deemed excessive: ‘of all the parts of a man that can hurt, a penis is the least’ Self-indulgence and inconsistency characterised The Female Eunuch as well, but they were rendered unimportant by the book’s overall zest. In 1970, Greer wrote as an optimist in tune with her time, and shaping it. This is a less buoyant, less coherent volume by ...”