“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Venezuela, and Latin America began another turn to the left. In one country after another, self-described socialists, from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, came to power. In April 2008, Fernando Lugo, a priest, became president of Paraguay, ending more than six ...”

“... Revolution is that both Jimmy Wales and one of his first collaborators, Larry Sanger, are self-confessed and totally earnest ‘objectivists’, meaning followers of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Sanger wrote his doctoral thesis at Ohio State University under the title ‘Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification’. He and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them so I try and make my pain to their requirements. Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defences are knocked down in one sweep. In sickness we can’t avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... slow, anonymous sedimentation of immemorial custom; the constitution is no gift but the continuous self-defining public activity of the nation.’ Burke is a sedimentalist, just as he is, in a non-pejorative sense, a sentimentalist. The sentiments of the people, himself included, are political facts accreted over time, which cannot be ignored or easily ...”

“... barrel of Urals crude in June to $67 in December. All this has been exacerbated by the Kremlin’s self-destructive decisions. In August, Putin introduced retaliatory sanctions against countries that had mandated measures against Russia, the main effect of which has been drastically to reduce food imports and raise prices, helping to push inflation to an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate.’ Her amnesia isn’t straightforwardly self-protective, since one of the things she does remember is her husband saying, when she was in hospital to give birth: ‘Now you are going to have to learn to love something, you wicked woman.’ The unnamed ‘yard boy’ who gives another story its title is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Referendum Party contested 547 seats and lost all of them. The story of how that idea, self-evidently ridiculous in 1997, came to be a reality in 2016 is going to be often retold as we live through its consequences over the next few decades. One of the characteristics of the story is a distinctly British unseriousness: tragedy and farce, as so ...”

“... 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 ...”