“... he was still alive? Either way, Edward seems to have coped superbly, testimony to the courage and self-confidence that this biography ...”

“... was made for the public use of the people.’ The Bible was bursting at both ends: radicals and self-appointed prophets were adding to scripture; scholars were eroding it. These unco-ordinated interventions had immediate literary repercussions, and Milton’s Paradise Lost is the crucial text in any discussion of the relation between divine and human powers ...”

“... realised version of The Trial, the melancholy Chimes at Midnight (1965), and several low-budget, self-reflexive documentaries. These movies constitute a substantial body of work in themselves, and a brief return to Hollywood in the late 1950s yielded Touch of Evil, a noir which looks better every year. McBride, the feisty author of biographies on two complex ...”

“... an element apart into its gaseous components. In the learned clubs of Jena, where fascination with self-experimentation and the transcendent properties of the human senses ruled the roost, experimenters applied the battery to their own eyes, ears and genitals in search of life’s true cause. Readers would soon learn of Victor Frankenstein’s similarly ...”

“... is riveting. A series of failed suicide attempts (classified by the military as ‘manipulative self-injurious behaviour’) and mass hunger strikes have taken place in Guantánamo. The first hunger strike began in February 2002, just over a month after the first prisoners arrived there, shackled hand and foot, hooded and blindfolded by blacked-out ...”

“... she becomes increasingly inaccessible and remote. At the same time, Changez’s treasured American self, especially after it experiences a contradictory and scandalous moment of happiness on witnessing the destruction of the Twin Towers on television in a hotel room in Manila, begins to crumble, as does his sense of his corporate mission: The following ...”

“... by the sense of power that money gives, and even in his development as a physicist he was largely self-taught: he had never done any research under or with anyone and probably had hardly ever been contradicted by anyone of his age.’ Yet Kuhn found him courteous and considerate and never discovered any inclination to Fascism in him. In As I Was Going to St ...”

“... British historian of ideas; and the author of an autobiography so uncompromisingly egotistic and self-critical as to horrify most of its readers. He was also a writer of extraordinary gifts: angular, lapidary and sombre. From the 1850s, Pattison’s efforts were largely devoted to the history of classical scholarship in Europe since the Renaissance. Only ...”

“... out in the memoir, which tells relatively little of her story, not only because it was written in self-defence but also because she lived another 24 eventful years after it was published. Mazarin died shortly after Hortense’s marriage, leaving her – or rather her husband – not only almost all of his fabulous wealth and property, but also his ...”

“... line – well that would be a pretty small price to pay if only we could stop listening to those self-righteous fucking Americans. What would it take for this regime to stumble? People have been saying for a long time that Putin will not be tested until oil prices fall. Now oil prices are falling, and Putin-Medvedev are mostly blaming the United States and ...”

“... something desirable and rewarding in and for itself, a means towards human happiness, dignity and self-fulfilment, shaping a world in which ‘the idle are the only wretched.’ This dialectical pattern is traced in most of the chapters. The discussion of military prowess as an aspiration begins by outlining the aristocratic ideal which saw physical courage ...”

“... far from flawless, almost effortlessly distinctive and intelligent; and while his third, the self-consciously terse, thrillerish Zanzibar, was less impressive, it is with Turbulence, his first book since his appointment as professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia in 2007, that real difficulties begin. The distinctive blurs into the ...”

“... or lives in England, the imbalance is even more absurd. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have self-government while England has only ‘the imperial Parliament’ of the UK. While the empire lasted, Englishness dozed quietly under the cloak of Great Britishness. Now the cloak is off, and Englishness wakes in a sour temper. England is well administered but ...”

“... circles of hell, which function to strip away a person’s humanity and undermine their sense of self. The erosion of people’s ability to see themselves as people was what led Ba Jin to characterise the Cultural Revolution as a ‘spiritual holocaust’. The Party leaders in Beijing understood the power of depriving people of their reputations and ...”

“... as a ‘celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit’. It’s the last of these conditions that Pluto and Eris don’t satisfy, so the IAU invented a ...”