“... through these things in fantasy and come out the other side. Dostoevsky’s epilepsy was a form of self-punishment for his wish, a revulsion from its extravagant historical completion. According to this logic, Dostoevsky’s actual punishment, in 1849, for his membership of a group of young socialists – along with his fellows he was subjected to a mock ...”

“... French West Indies and returning with cargoes of sugar and cotton. This was all very well, but no self-respecting entrepreneur could fail to notice that by adding another leg to these voyages, vastly greater profits could be made. Ships arriving in the West Indies from France could trade their load of manufactured cloth, brandy, wine and other goods for ...”

“... of international law currently circulate. One sees the limits of state obligation as drawn by self-interest: they’re taken to encompass a limited degree of altruism by citizens towards their compatriots, but not to extend as far as the woaded inhabitants of ‘bongo-bongo land’, or even the members of the next Neighbourhood Watch. The other view takes ...”

“... from a resistant material, structure or context – architecture quickly becomes arbitrary or self-indulgent. (Here again part of the problem might be the technical facility of Catia, which is said to translate ‘the gestural quality from model to built work’ all but directly.) The great irony is that Gehry fans tend to confuse his arbitrariness with ...”

“... epic. ‘He is “Old Ez” in the stockade; the sufferer “au bout de toutes mes forces”; the self-critic who has been “hard as youth sixty years”.’ For some reason, Read was particularly touched by what he saw as Pound’s change of heart towards Winston Churchill. The Pisan stockade remained on active service in literary criticism for rather ...”

“... that women should be passive and decorative singers who required male assistance rather than self-contained and innovative musicians. Yet the movement wasn’t made up only of worldly grown-ups such as the Raincoats’ Ana da Silva, who was 27 when they formed, had a doctorate and had written a thesis on Bob Dylan. It also contained excited ...”

“... tries to be bubbly about its degeneracy, but it’s mostly just a jokeless, pulpless exercise in self-abuse. Of course it tends to like lagers and motors, fighting and hooligans, and imagines the rest of the world is fraudulent and missing out because it has other things on its mind. What’s sad about the magazine is that, despite its defensive bluster, it ...”

“... own manner here; McCrum quotes Wodehouse’s editor at Vanity Fair who remembered him as ‘self-effacing, slow-witted and matter of fact . . . I never heard him utter a clever, let alone a brilliant, remark.’ Wodehouse shows signs of impatience with this convention in The Code of the Woosters (1938) where Bertie drops some of his best witticisms to ...”

“... role in liberating those it treated from sexual and social repression. Reich, the group’s self-appointed leader, doubted whether ‘the bourgeoisie [could] live side by side with psychoanalysis for any length of time without damage to itself’. ‘In the 1920s and 1930s,’ Danto suggests, ‘analysts saw themselves as brokers of social change for ...”

“... Both believed themselves to be beyond human laws; both lost sight of the difference between their self-love and the interests of the country they were ostensibly protecting. Both benefited from a culture of denunciation, in which people would betray their friends and relatives either to forestall the witchfinder’s finger coming to rest on them, or to gain a ...”

“... contrasts in mood between each – all these were evidence of a high degree of professionalism and self-assurance. However, there was a striking contrast between the music and the words: not only because the music was so accomplished and the words were often so inept (sometimes to the point of nonsensicality), but because the music was melancholy and intimate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... under vow, where Johnson inserts a whole stanza from Cowley’s ‘Ode upon Liberty’. Look under self, and you will find 22 quotations from Shakespeare. Johnson designed the Dictionary as a work of entertainment, and instruction, as well as of cold information. He embellished his work with aphorisms, anecdotes an pieces of information drawn from ...”

“... a saga of the national emergence of America, synchronised to ride on the 1976 wave of bicentennial self-satisfaction. But as Leon Uris, another practitioner in the field, has pointed out, the American ‘birth of a nation’ formula can be transplanted anywhere in the world. Hence, in Uris’s case, Exodus (Israel) and Trinity (Ireland). Trinity, which made ...”

“... history as drama, very often tragedy. His tribute to Raleigh, rising as a poet above his pettier self and that of his age, is discerning. He has a frequently compelling turn of phrase. ‘Ireland, of course, is irony’s chosen country,’ he remarks on the oddity of Burke, emotional and romantic, coming to be venerated as founder of modern ...”