“... all. The work is not without charm or felicities of style, but it is pretty thin stuff: precious, self-indulgent fluff. It is also true, however, that had Brautigan been an Easterner, an Ivy League graduate, a habitué of upper Manhattan literary soirées, he might well have been allowed a gentler landing. But he was not any of those things: he was a ...”

“... resolution authorising the war on terrorism, preferring instead to rely on an extended claim of self-defence. It has forged new alliances with illiberal regimes in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, reversing years of effort to promote human rights. In an age of increasing interdependence and co-operation, Bush and his advisers are ...”

“... Commissioners. (To say that they appear an obscure bunch, whose qualifications are far from self-explanatory, would be an understatement.) This means that the reader is deprived of information essential to judging the value of these reports. One example will suffice. It has been known for at least thirty years that two of the principal witnesses before ...”

“... to belief in gods and spirits with loyalty to seemingly unrelated national, ethnic or other self-differentiated coalitions in such a way as to generate what is currently termed ‘fundamentalism’. But what about refuseniks like Scaradino, or like Diagoras of Melos who, when shown the votive offerings in the temple of Poseidon at Samothrace, which had ...”

“... assume a formal pose, staring into or just past the camera. Warhol, too, was interested in the self-presentation of representative types, though his work was not as encyclopedic as Sander’s. The subjects Warhol screen-tested could be classified as musicians, actors, dancers, poets, painters, art critics, curators, gallery owners, performance ...”

“... in particular, is widely taught and universally admired. The protagonist of McTeague is a self-trained dentist, famous for extracting teeth with fingers rather than pliers. Brutishly strong, he leads a life of animal contentment, working all week and then spending Sundays eating, sleeping and playing a few songs on his concertina. His routine is ...”

“... Military successes were wrapped up with the stylised Prussian virtues of austerity, duty and self-sacrifice to make a powerful Hohenzollern mystique. A cult of Frederick the Great flowered as early as the 1750s, in sermons, poems, ballads and silk sashes that bore the message ‘long live the king.’ Frederick and his successors were adept at playing up ...”

“... soul’ is ‘less likely than ever to recover radical innocence and learn at last/that it is self-delighting’. Anxiety and dread mount as the poem progresses. It adds to this effect that almost every stanza cites an official formula, an order or instruction of some kind: ‘Stop Ahead’; ‘Out of Order’; ‘Please Examine Your Change’; ‘Please ...”

“... be preserved, catalogued and made accessible in its “born digital format”’. But Fletcher, a self-confessed devotee of Conrad, wonders whether digital materials have the same value as manuscripts. ‘Towards the end of Conrad’s life,’ Fletcher says, ‘he was much preoccupied with selling his manuscripts to T.J. Wise – and endorsing them (at ...”

“... inundation by a ‘veritable deluge’ of complaints, ranging from the relatively commonplace and self-explanatory, such as claustrophobia, to the downright idiosyncratic, such as triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13. Twenty years later, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud was to respond with similar impatience to the list of phobias ...”

“... and reasoned reflection, rather than only by financial incentives (acting merely as ‘self-interested rational actors’): ‘One by one, then, the signposts to sustainability are being erected; and I regard ecological citizenship as a key addition to the collection.’This sense of ecological responsibility is part of a new trend which straddles ...”

“... existed. But he appears to have been the first to ask at what speed they travel. It is taken as self-evident, in popular texts at least, that this must be the speed of light, though there is no obvious reason why there should be only one universal speed in nature. Before him, physicists had assumed that the consistency of physics required the speed of ...”

“... of the lesbian romance. The matron, new to England from Australia, is not frail or consumptive but self-possessed and butch: when she looks in the bathroom mirror, wearing a binder and sleeveless tee, she sees a strong jaw and brow passed down from grandfather to father. At the boarding school on a one-year placement, she owes no allegiance to the world of ...”

“... allegiance between king and subject, which in turn meant that Parliament ‘on the principles of self-defence … without respect to constitutional forms, had a right to oppose the tyrant to the utmost’. Macaulay welcomed the republic of 1649-53, but not the subsequent Cromwellian Protectorate – Cromwell was a hypocritical usurper who had exploited the ...”

“... it back together again. Just fifteen months after his diagnosis, having considered then rejected self-referral to Dignitas (‘a package of medical costs, funeral expenses and official fees would cost 10,500 Swiss francs – approximately £7700 – plus airfare’), he signed up for aHSCT.Metamorphosis has an unusual structure.It begins with Chapter 42 ...”