“... in the redemptive powers of fracking don’t pooh-pooh the Nixon/Carter call for democratic self-discipline. They just apply it to something else: the debt. People on the right who embrace the predestined adaptability of American democracy on environmental issues question it on fiscal ones. They have replaced fears of what dependence on overseas oil ...”

“... are palm trees on the esplanade but they are somewhat dog-eared, and the marina is not one where a self-respecting oligarch would want to moor his yacht. A new one is being built, to be run by the British firm Camper & Nicholsons; it will have houses – Nereids and Thetis Residences – built on artificial reefs, offering the inestimable advantage of being ...”

“... expression she gives to her deeply inhibited and perverse sexual nature: gruesome episodes of self-harming, ritual exploits in seedy voyeurism, infantile excursions into low-grade pornography. At home she dances a grim pas de deux of mutual exploitation with her old mother. At work, as a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatoire, she assumes the role of ...”

“... did. Heroism and hero-worship enact a similar orientation towards transcendent Fact, and so does self-forgetful labour, that ‘appeal from the Seen to the Unseen’ (‘laborare est orare’), which Carlyle describes as the only way for the unheroic to gain real as distinct from hypothetical knowledge. According to his notion of the feudal loyalty that ...”

“... rebelled against the German-dominated tastes of the Petersburg Conservatory and developed a self-conscious Russian style, incorporating ‘what they heard in village songs, in Cossack and Caucasian dances, in church chants and . . . in the tolling of church bells’. The Moscow Opera grew out of this revolt; so did Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art ...”

“... at the last worry, the greatest, that in all the wagons west and pioneering, in all the strenuous self-dramatisation of being American, maybe nothing matters, maybe there is no meaning. What was it that didn’t matter? There was a small cemetery outside Sacramento that had once belonged to the family. Over the years, it had fallen into disrepair; monuments ...”

“... a version of that unclothed imagination. Hazlitt also praises Bloomfield as an ‘ingenious and self-taught’ poet, whose verse is distinguished for ‘delicacy, fruitfulness and naivety’. This primitivism is cherished by Clare, but alongside it is the anxiety that because the ploughman’s shoe fits him, he will be seen as for ever plodding ...”

“... that the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake: President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship’s commander and crew were awarded high military honours. Two days after the downing of the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in blood-splattered ...”

“... very approach tenses the muscles and always arouses suspicion, are here personally reduced to the self-effacing Mr Brown then replaced by the faceless banana company, which brings with it capitalism, modernity, union-busting, bloody repression and an inevitable relocation (an uncanny anticipation of the US’s own plague of factory expatriation decades ...”

“... his support to right-wing libertarianism, and ended up endorsing Ayn Rand’s tirades against ‘self-styled “intellectuals”’ – ‘moral cannibals’ and ‘gigolos of science’ – who mislead the masses with their ‘prattle’ about the unfairness of capitalism.The Paris symposium gave a similar fillip to another Austrian economist, Friedrich ...”

“... him. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he went through what Boulez called a ‘period of intense self-questioning, possibly as a result of the explorations carried out by some of his pupils (of whom I was one) who had made a more or less radical break with his personal predilections’. Out of this period emerged one of his least characteristic works, an ...”

“... about a ‘character’ who was also a type. Something was lost with the protective modesty and self-surveillance that came with the spread of a standard of politeness.Gillray’s annus mirabilis was 1782, when he produced 52 plates, most of them on political subjects. The great events he would trace in the next quarter-century include the rise and rapid ...”

“... computation of time, without any populist exhibitionism, if anything with a certain retrospective self-irony.’ His politics were Marxist and anti-Stalinist; critical too – this was much rarer on the Far Left in Italy – of Maoism.Timpanaro’s political commitments informed and transformed his work. Technically speaking, what happened was that he widened ...”

“... they wouldn’t notice if they burned themselves on a hot stove. Towering in their intellect and self-esteem, blunt bangs on a perfect brain, long legs in tarty skirts, don’t care, don’t care. Marvellous, funny, in a way that Byatt purported to be afraid to be. Delivered straight out of the voice, disarming. ‘Literary people are death, I should ...”

“... on their direction. Here’s a way to think about it: you live in a community that is entirely self-sufficient but produces one cash crop a year, consisting of a hundred crates of mangoes. In advance of the harvest, because it’s helpful for you to get the money now and not later, you sell the future ownership of the mango crop to a broker, for a dollar a ...”