“... and knew me,’ but there doesn’t seem to be much irony here, only considerable impatience and self-aggrandisement, such as comes from knowing you’re the hero of a novel. We also, by this stage of the work, have read quite a few pages of the notebook as it was being written (‘to me art has never seemed a subject or an aspect of form, but rather a ...”

“... into turmoil, as ‘bourgeois experts’ came under suspicion of treason and young outsiders, self-styled ‘proletarians’ with Party cards, assailed establishments in every field. The social sciences were no exception: the ‘modern’ professions of sociology, psychology, criminology, demography and statistics suffered tremendous setbacks: they lost ...”

“... would come out fighting, so Stockman interrupted, harried and bullied Reagan. It destroyed his self-confidence: ‘What have you done to my husband?’ Nancy Reagan demanded. Worse, they had prepped Reagan for the wrong opponent. Aware of Reagan’s popularity, Mondale’s team came up with what they called the ‘gold watch strategy’; rather than attack ...”

“... expression of a homogenous viewpoint, or even, in a figurative sense, the viewpoint of a corporate self. It is this type of personhood, taken further, that is conveyed by the term ‘democratic’ Athens. The rule of the demos, carried out through short-term representatives and offices, combined the sense of corporate selfhood with that of large-scale ...”

“... executive and a model of stable governance. Crucially, it recognised the inevitability of Algerian self-determination. In these fundamental respects, the Fifth Republic did indeed appear to be a break with the past. But, as Chapman explains, Algeria also enabled the state to refine the art of population management. The Algerian migrant population in France ...”

“... the Berliner Tageblatt, a man admired even by Goebbels for his elegant prose, to Egon Erwin Kisch, self-styled ‘raging reporter’, who literally jumped ship in Melbourne after being refused entry to Australia because of his communist sympathies (he broke his leg after falling five metres). Kisch, like many others, received hostile treatment from the ...”

“... that two years after his election, many in France – and increasingly in Europe – consider his self-styled progressive identity to be at odds with his actual politics: a mix of neoliberalism and authoritarianism, projected by means of his own distinctive form of populism. Neoliberal attitudes are what one might expect of a man who had no background in ...”

“... it seems to me, is what the memoir is all about: the difficulty Sibylle has in breaking with a self defined by her father’s absence. Magisterial and unkind as Lacan could be, his name doesn’t weigh too heavily on her – it wasn’t until she was 21 that she was asked whether she was ‘the daughter of’. Her feelings of inadequacy, her dislike of ...”

“... exotic voyages to the Far East, pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and European journeys undertaken for self-betterment, anticipating the 18th-century Grand Tour. What Legassie calls ‘the prestige economy of long-distance knowledge’ made bestsellers of such works as Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde, written with Rustichello da Pisa – a composer of ...”

“... in. Snipers’ pillboxes and signs warning of unexploded mines remained, and so did the now-fading self-importance that comes to a place taught to think of itself as being on the front line of imminent invasion. Above the high-tide line, the beach was a broad ridge of hard-to-walk-on pebbles, where a cluster of scruffy boats was drawn up beside the twin huts ...”

“... because of its anticipated practical effects, and because it seemed to fit with his rather self-conscious defiance of convention and religion. He was also responding to the industrial conflicts of early 20th-century America. A speech given by the labour organiser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a silk-workers’ strike in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913 ...”

“... more remote than Stafford’s Boston. I’m stalled on the threshold of Boston Adventure by the self-consciousness of the highly wrought prose. By contrast, the first half of Stafford’s second novel, The Mountain Lion, is breathtakingly original and flies free of what feels mannered and dated elsewhere in her work. Some of her short stories are also very ...”

“... you know. They’re thugs’), just setting out a bowl of milk. When Otto accuses her of self-indulgence, she replies: ‘I don’t care why I’m doing it. The point is that I can see it starving.’ So when the cat shows up that evening, Sophie caresses its back: She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human ...”

“... He appears to have started off with good intentions. At their first meeting he told Hastings self-deprecatingly that ‘any newspaper that attempted to impose my convictions on its readership would be in danger of possessing a circulation of one.’ But if this was a sincere commitment to the notion of editorial independence it did not last long. A few ...”

“... in a review of two of the 1951 volumes, Nottinghamshire and Cornwall. In less out-doorsy, more self-consciously cultivated circles the new guides, with their unmistakably foreign approach, got a mixed reception. John Summerson, reviewing them for the New Statesman, felt a need to bring his readers, and indeed himself, round to the idea. ‘Books on the ...”