“... adversary and antithesis. As a follower of Booker T. Washington, Micheaux preached a gospel of self-help and individual responsibility. Between 1919 and 1940 (with one last epic, The Betrayal, in 1948), he wrote, directed, produced and distributed perhaps as many as forty feature films, exhibiting a tenacity unparalleled in American independent cinema. At ...”

“... the pulse of continuity in European literatures from Caxton and Boccaccio to Rilke, Valéry and Robert Lowell. For Carne-Ross, the continuities and echo-densities which relate Pindar to Ezra Pound, which make Leopardi stylise a scene in the exact light of Horace, which provide Ariosto and Gongora with stylistically diverse but equally dynamic relations to ...”

“... savoured of art or taste was excluded. In the studio which Coldstream shared with Graham Bell in Robert Street off the Hampstead Road ‘art’ had become a dirty word, though the depth of bitterness was reserved for the word ‘artistic’. Coldstream’s time at the GPO Film Unit was coming to an end, but his association with John Grierson had a lasting ...”

“... San Francisco, introduced by Helen Vendler. Vendler had already done an edition of Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ for Arion, printed on roundel pages – wheels of paper 18” in diameter – with work by several artists, including Willem de Kooning and Jim Dine, as well as a selection of Wallace Stevens with a frontispiece by Jasper ...”

“... it ‘without irony’. As the exhibition demonstrates, it was impossible to invoke it without self-consciousness, but that is not the same thing. The cult of the cult of ruins continued to serve British artists well, especially the neo-Romantics of the 1930s and 1940s. Paul Nash’s abstracted megaliths, geometric forms set in the Wiltshire landscape, are ...”

“... to the United Nations, former director of Harvard’s Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and self-described ‘genocide chick’, who advocated war in Libya and Syria, and argued for new ways to arm-twist US allies into providing more troops for Obama’s escalated but unsuccessful war in Afghanistan. This last argument wasn’t successful in ...”

“... book went to press too long ago for Obama to get a mention; Jeb Bush’s absurd claim to be a ‘self-made man’ – ‘few batted an eye at that description’ – is set up to be knocked down, however. In the second half of Outliers, Gladwell makes some bolder and not always so persuasive claims about broader ethnic contexts: Korean pilots are more likely ...”

“... its wealth; so he lavishes scruples on his readers. Heaney’s poetry is loaded with anxiety and self-tormented power. At times this is truly powerful, and at other times merely self-tormented. But this is nevertheless the grimace of a major poet.In much of his work, both in verse and prose, Heaney has struggled for a ...”

“... try to avoid deceiving ourselves’. He cites the conclusion of the editors of a symposium on self-deception, that though ‘it promotes short-run psychological health ... Long-run psychological health is thereby constrained.’ He seems unaware of the research which suggests that the mentally healthy are more likely to have a deficient perception of ...”

“... sight of something by the shore of the lake: turtles waddling in to end the story in the manner of Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ or Tobias Wolff’s ‘Poaching’: ‘They watch those turtles on their slow march and behold those ancient creatures, shell-backed and the colour of time, as they lower themselves, turtle upon turtle, disappearing into the ...”

“... Stoker himself would have learned of the bizarre practice of which Count Dracula’s sanguinary self-medication is a grand guignol variant – the systematic consumption of human tissue for therapeutic purposes. ‘The old physicians,’ Van Helsing’s colleague Dr Seward tells us darkly, ‘took account of things which their followers do not accept, and ...”

“... book is fastidious about segregating Yiddish and vernacular American speech from the narrator’s self-consciously literary English, which even uses British rather than American spelling. In an essay published in 1990, Hana Wirth-Nesher argued that David experiences the English language as ‘a foreign culture inhabiting his psyche. Whether he desires it or ...”

“... grown in step with the expansion of Anglo-America’s intellectual and cultural capital. Lilla, a self-declared ‘centrist liberal’, arrived at his present position by way of working-class Detroit, evangelical Christianity and an early flirtation with neoconservatism. The British writers belong to a traditional elite; shared privilege transcends ...”

“... other than with the Almighty, played a secondary role. The nub of this doctrine is ‘To thine own self be true,’ where integrity – saying what one conscientiously thinks, or at least not saying what one doesn’t think – is central, just as it is in John Rawls’s theory of justice of 1971. The claim that access to speech matters doesn’t flatly ...”

“... the one case in a million where judicial wrongdoing might go unredressed. This is not quite as self-interested as it sounds. The threat of litigation which hangs over every American operating theatre and consulting room, and increasingly over every British one too, has a palpable effect on the way medicine is practised. Undoubtedly the fear of litigation ...”