“... spirited? Yet Frank was keener than E.P. on sacrifice, which he linked with the immersion of the self in some larger instance: for a budding scholar, the quest for the Sangreal might have been a model (the Winchester manuscript of Morte d’Arthur was discovered in the College library in his second year), but in the end the man of action was drawn to the ...”

“... he wrote to one of his girlfriends. ‘Perhaps because she never does anything to shatter my self-confidence or vanity.’ After his death she remembered ‘the joy of reading the letter’ containing what Julian called ‘great news’: he was sleeping with Anthony Blunt – his ‘first love affair’. She realised then that he ‘meant to tell me ...”

“... of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real ...”

“... brothers were called Casper and Balthasar), Melchior was slender and angelic looking (if his self-portrait is accurate), well educated, peripatetic and versatile. He trained as a goldsmith in Lübeck, and was polished in Italy on a Grand Tour subsidised by the Danish king. He liked to turn his hand to all kinds of ...”

“... would be a partial Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza; Palestinian elections for a self-governing body to replace the Israeli military government and civil administration; and negotiations over a final peace treaty to be concluded by the end of the transitional period. In his useful book Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin and Sadat at ...”

“... law with a rhetoric of religious nationalism and righteous victimhood.) Isolation has nourished self-reliance, self-reliance has encouraged sacrifice, and sacrifice is widely seen as proof of virtue. The Islamic Republic’s tenacity during the war with Iraq should give pause to anyone who imagines that it will bend under ...”

“... has been invoked to explain depression, tinnitus, pornography addiction and masochistic self-mutilation (this last is supposedly a result of pain pathways getting rewired to the brain’s pleasure centres). Once new neural circuits become established in our brains, they demand to be fed, and they can hijack brain areas devoted to valuable mental ...”

“... setting of Merrill’s childhood,’ Hammer writes. ‘It showed him that a house could be a self-enclosed world, expressive of its owner. It left him both attracted to and resistant to everything that was grand.’ While Merrill’s adulthood was filled with privilege, fun, friendship, sex and poetry, his childhood appears to have been unhappy. A sickly ...”

“... of Pound in Vol. I, ‘a genuine representative of both its more enlightened impulses and its self-destructive contradictions.’ Leaving aside the question of what Moody may mean here by ‘his culture’, to grant Pound heroic status from the outset is unwise. Moody nowhere says that Pound read Thomas Carlyle, but Carlyle’s notion of a church of ...”

“... current in which one would expect to find obedience rather than dissent, conformity rather than self-criticism, doctrinaire ideologues rather than introspective individuals’. But his story suggests that it is our expectations about that ‘current’ which need to be adjusted. If al-Suri remained in the good graces of al-Qaida, it’s probably because his ...”

“... in the shadows, to funnel taxpayers’ dollars to companies run by friends and acquaintances. Such self-dealing is especially likely in times of crisis, when it can be claimed that secrecy is necessary on the grounds of national security and competitive bidding rules are laxly enforced. But, once again, it makes little sense to blame such gross abuses of ...”

“... think there could be no middle ground: between people and non-people. The humour may be seen as self-justificatory: if Plautus can imagine that slaves are just like doors, then there’s no harm in beating them up. But it may also seem symptomatic of a fear on the part of the slave-owning classes, that at least part of their property may be animate after ...”

“... and between them the Crisps spent a lot of money. They were, Colley says, ‘young, divided, self-inventing individuals with something to prove’, and though they were hardy and experienced travellers they were not experienced in London society. There were two children, Burrish and Elizabeth Maria. A fashionable man-midwife was retained, and twice over ...”

“... it is true, but why it should stick so. Lionel Trilling, in an essay collected in The Opposing Self (1955), seems to repeat the claim but then makes a remarkable intellectual swerve. Tolstoy, Trilling says, is perhaps not the greatest of novelists but he is the ‘most central’: It is he who gives to the novel its norm and standard, the norm and ...”

“... Post’s South Asia bureau chief, based in New Delhi. Given the CIA’s paranoid and often self-defeating secrecy, what makes his book especially interesting is how he came to know what he claims to know. He has read everything on the Afghan insurgency and the civil wars that followed, and has been given access to the original manuscript of Robert ...”