“... life – Dante’s profound understanding of the nature of the encounter between past and present, self and other, which cannot be explained in terms of influence or style but only in terms of the whole person. Our relation to the masters we choose from the past – or who seem to choose us – is partly our relation to our fathers, partly to our ...”

“... from high romance: the dying hero, and the great undying love of lovers who are at once a single self and complementary parts of a whole. This combination of ideas allows us to feel both a wrongness in Jackson himself and a goodness around him (female – located in this first wife, and then in the baby daughter towards whom love for Jackson is shifted). In ...”

“... days in the cold winter of our discontent when we seem to enjoy a truce from the struggle of self-assertion to abandon oneself to the abandon of a woman who seems to live and breathe only for us ... to pick out with a lobster fork all the sweetness that life has to offer in its most inaccessible tentacles ... For ... each moment has its cash value, and ...”

“... over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, “Victorian Values” (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism.’ And the wrong definition? Why, of course, ‘whatever Margaret Thatcher herself at any time did or said’. She was, admittedly, ‘the indispensable element of the revolution which so astonished ...”

“... it’s so full of mannered and repetitive remarks, and because Cocteau works so hard at his self-admiration. ‘I am the model of an anti-intellectual,’ he says, but only a certain sort of intellectual would say any such thing. The sort who speaks grandly of ‘the accident we call life’ and ‘that dreadful state of childhood from which I shall ...”

“... and the Post Office, and his account is particularly dense in that important area. He is the most self-denying of the three where speculation is concerned. Where there is no hard evidence, Super says nothing. Unlike the other two, he gives comprehensive summaries of the novels, and his narrative organisation is chronological and highly segmented. As a ...”

“... or death. To be sure, there are no obvious Lenins, Hitlers or even Mussolinis on the horizon: the self-confessed candidates, like Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the Liberal Democratic Party or Generals Makashov and Sterligov who position themselves within the ‘Red-Brown’ coalition of Communists and nationalists, are risible to most Russians and are made to seem ...”

“... overly victim-conscious. He was beginning ‘to distrust political indignation in general and the self-righteousness of the extreme left in particular’. Meanwhile, what of Cristian Huneeus? From his correspondence, Gould learned that he had become involved with the magazine Mundo Nuevo – a South American version of Encounter, quietly sponsored by the ...”

“... is that the new state would be truly transitional towards the practicable limits of its own self-dissolution into the associated life of society as a whole.’ But this marked the end of his early expectations. By then, he knew that Régis Debray had been right: the events in France in 1968 announced a voyage to China which, like ...”

“... are going to be in better scholarly focus than others. When she writes, in a not entirely self-explanatory section on ‘the fetish’, that Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon ‘was inspired by fetish objects – the African masks that he first saw on a trip to Spain in 1905’ – the fact that the date, the location and the influence are all wrong ...”

“... That significance is obscured by the ideas of Sin and Truth, for these are individualistic, self-dramatising notions. Dewey thought that Christianity comes into its own only when people stop worrying about the state of their soul, and realise that their subjectivity is the creature of their culture rather than of either an angry or a sweet-tempered ...”

“... John Wayne Bobbitt’s girlfriend was acquitted of assault for severing his dick; her grounds were self-defence. John Wayne Gacy was one of many serial killers and mass murderers infatuated with John Wayne. Henry Kissinger is another. ‘I’ve always acted alone,’ he has said. ‘Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy ... entering the ...”

“... the pro-Nazi sympathies evinced by many Afrikaner Nationalists. Having bought into Communism in self-defence against Fascism, many were at first quite discomfited to find that this might entail the acceptance of blacks as equals. Slovo recalls with great humour and fondness this now vanished ghetto world in which for armchair socialists ‘a kaffir remained ...”

“... described in the memoir began in 1888, when the Yeats family were living in Bedford Park, a self-contained, rather bohemian artists’ community, between Hammersmith and Acton in West London. William was 23, Susan Yeats (or Lily, as she was known within the family) was 22, Elizabeth (Lolly) 20. Their father, who had given up the law shortly after he ...”

“... Congress has been the victim of its own early success. It was seen to have brought India to self-rule. It embodied the new nation, secular, democratic and united, and was its central symbol. It also had support from abroad. The Americans were irritated by Nehru’s insistence that post-Revolutionary China should be allowed into the United Nations and by ...”