“... parts of the main musical chapter, their continuity with the 1918 ‘Philosophy of Music’ is self-evident, not least in the ‘Hollow Space’ (Der Hohlraum, a concept first considered in the book’s discourse on architecture) where the heroic Schoenberg of Geist der Utopie is at last reunited with his subsequent achievement. On his return to Germany ...”

“... riddle: what does the tale of rape and cannibalism in Thrace have in common with the Buddha’s self-sacrifice in his animal incarnation? Empson knew a lot about Buddhism, which he saw as representing a stage of religious development from which Christianity, with its equation of love with torture, was a regression. Moreover he had argued, in his lost book ...”

“... but once back home, he writes to his friend Thomas McGreevy dismissing the problem with much self-conscious wordplay, going on to reflect at length on poetry and painting. One of the high points of the first volume is an unusually candid letter to McGreevy in 1935 in which Beckett, now in Jungian analysis in London, acknowledges a possible psychosomatic ...”

“... loomed over city squares. The Dutch, unlike the British in India, had inflicted few obviously self-aggrandising monuments on the country they exploited. Squatters now lived in the decaying colonial district of Kota in Jakarta where the Dutch had once created a replica of home, complete with mansions, canals and cobbled squares. By the time I visited, the ...”

“... MacDonald, as if the authentic Bowie had revealed himself at last. But the concept of an authentic self, slippery at the best of times, has almost no purchase at all when it comes to Bowie. ‘I’m very happy with Ziggy, I think he was a very successful character and I think I played him very well, but I’m glad I’m me now,’ he says earnestly in Cracked ...”

“... belonging together of ecstasy and antipathy, or fixation and bewilderment – elation, absurdity, self-loss, panic, disbelief – is basic to Picasso’s understanding of sex, and therefore of human life au fond. And the very word ‘fascination’ speaks to the normality of the intertwining: its Latin root, fascinus, means simply ‘erect penis’.) But ...”

“... Gustaf Kossinna, the human cultures which mattered were not interpenetrating but autochthonous, self-creating. They did not derive from the impact of, or mixture with, other cultures (invaders, migrants, intermarriage across ethnic boundaries), but arose and developed as the consequences of innate biological forces in their own ‘blood’ or gene-pool. A ...”

“... of resident reviewers in contemporary broadsheets – superficiality, over-confident judgments, self-importance, puffing – and Wilson was not as exempt from these as it might please us to think. Nonetheless, this platform made him a person of consequence in literary New York. Though scarcely more than thirty, he was already being teasingly referred to as ...”

“... as time went on the atmosphere became almost strained, though with Willie his usual smiling vague self. At the finish the madame was insistent that we should not all leave together so we separately filtered out into an empty Bond Street with me wondering if this at last was ‘living’. 7 July. It’s perhaps the quality of my acquaintance but I have yet to ...”

“... 1960s, Kim Il Sung instituted big changes, redirecting the state ideology towards nationalism and self-reliance and provoking sharp clashes with Moscow – enough to make Alexei Kosygin and Yuri Andropov come running to Pyongyang, where Kim essentially told them to go to hell. Whatever North Korea has been since then, it hasn’t been Stalinist. Stalin’s ...”

“... to purify national communities, initiating a spiral of violence that led to war, genocide and self-immolation. Its devastating potential was rooted in the paradoxical promise of a revolution carried out in defence of hierarchy. As Paxton noted, this led either to entropy, as the movement failed to deliver, or to increasing radicalism, as leaders raced to ...”

“... Europe and the US, showing it won’t shirk from a staggering level of violence and grievous self-inflicted wounds to further its leaders’ aims. It would have shrugged off the emigration of a few hundred thousand disaffected young people, and the deaths and maiming of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Russians, as the necessary price of ...”

“... from an entry on 11 June of that year. This episode has some of the same shape, movement and self-sufficiency as Plath’s account of the St Botolph’s party; it even provides a natural closure to the first phase of Plath’s dazzlement. She had suspected Hughes of a flirtation or liaison – Clark writes in Red Comet that in this case he was most ...”

“... but deviated from events as they transpired. Consciously or not, this seems to have been a form of self-protection. As Kristóf set out to write down one story – what she called ‘my story’ – she ended up with something transformed. Her protagonists, too, are always trying and failing to record the story of their lives. ‘I try to write true ...”

“... good. He sees a real danger – of a carelessly supervised AGI rapidly developing through self-improvement into an all-powerful ASI with an a-human final intention – that is amenable to a real solution, of the precursor AI, the ‘seed AI’, being infused with pro-human values.Bostrom offers various strategies to define those values, and to get the ...”