“... of his discipline and focus. He was, according to his wife, ‘one of those inexplicably solid, self-sufficient and never-needy men who got by on air and water, impervious to injury or disease’. But he also had a bit of luck. When he started his business he designed a logo that included a paint roller resting at the bottom of a rainbow, recognisable to ...”

“... Aristotle. The RaMBaM, meanwhile, appears to have had a very different project. He writes in a self-consciously archaic Hebrew reminiscent of the Mishnah, the ancient (second century ad) core of rabbinic Judaism from which the Talmud later developed. His codification of that Judaism is dogmatic, and he articulates, in his Commentary on the Mishnah, the ...”

“... the other in the rational French of Calvinism, full of rhetorical questions and their self-evident answers that gave an illusion of argument rather than the substance. The region also preserved some local laws, not least to do with hunting, which were at odds with France’s national legal code, and all the more fiercely protected for that. More ...”

“... ignorance, or amnesia.’ In The Pregnant Widow, Amis tries very hard to get beyond the inflated self-regard that has got in the way of his recent attempts at geopolitical thinking. Except that it always seems to ping out somewhere else. There’s a particularly odd bit in the present novel where Amis reprises one of the pieces collected in The Second Plane ...”

“... think it was quite natural. It is easy to think of general reasons: new threats, loss of national self-confidence, the decline of (political) liberalism and so on. Another was undoubtedly an ‘empire strikes back’ effect: values and methods developed in the more authoritarian environments of Britain’s colonies coming home to roost. (A high proportion of ...”

“... What this means is that it has high unemployment and high long-term unemployment specifically. Self-employed people are rare, business insolvencies are high and a very large number of people have no qualifications. Four in every ten jobs are in the public sector – the NHS, local government and education. People die younger here than in almost any other ...”

“... instance, by Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, antiquarian, forger, embezzler and (as Johns writes) a ‘self-deluding impostor of extraordinary proportions’. Brydges spent much of his life composing unremarkable sonnets (about 2000 a year as he got older) while trying to prove (on extremely slight grounds) his right to the title Baron Chandos of Sudeley. The rest ...”

“... are laid. The logic is simple and compelling: as the banner hoisted over one of the yurts in a self-declared new neighbouhood put it in defiant capitals, ‘The master of the land is the people!’ The new mayor of Bishkek tried to calm the crowd of zakhvatchiki last week, promising that land would only be allocated ‘according to the law’. But ...”

“... towards the conviction that Palestinian statehood could be achieved only if Israel’s self-defined security needs were met: an erroneous assumption based on a flawed understanding of Israel’s strategy. The emphasis on ‘trust-building’ with Israel has coloured the evolution of the political process since 2003. The general movement towards ...”

“... from Aerial: fond dreams of invisibility; pained bafflement at Elvis’s trashy reclusion; the self-imposed exile of Charles Foster Kane; and Joan of Arc, ‘beautiful in her armour …’) Ever since, she has lived a life in many ways more like a writer’s than a modern pop star’s: pop’s own J.K. Rowling. (With her Roman Catholic background and taste ...”

“... sarcastic, often cruel to his male friends, and treated women appallingly. There is an element of self-portraiture in his 1918 obituary of Wedekind, whom he describes as ‘ugly, brutal, dangerous’. Brecht’s ambition comes through in a diary entry written when he was 22: ‘I am seized with a wish to have the whole world delivered: I wish all things to be ...”

“... delight in maintaining that such rules should not be broken, whether by head-butt or injudicious self-revelation. When two thugs intent on kidnap at the very least follow advertising executive Roger Thornhill into a packed lift in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, his mother, who knows what he’s afraid of, but considers him a fantasist, asks them if ...”

“... the Lost Love Letters, love is ‘a certain power of the soul, neither existing through itself nor self-contained, but always pouring itself into another with a kind of appetite and desire, willing to become one with the other so that, from two different wills, one single thing may be produced without difference.’ This sounds like the sort of definition ...”

“... The Ratliff stuff, which teeters between dark comedy and a more sympathetic depiction of redneck self-contempt, seems to belong in a novel by a figure like Barry Hannah, who briefly taught Tartt at the University of Mississippi, though it’s done without Hannah’s flair for loopy satire. Harriet, on the other hand, is decked out with tropes from ...”

“... of popular movements, the mushrooming of democratic organs at the base, and the rise of centres of self-management.’ These movements would work in tandem with the political front, but they would also act as a check on it. Partyism must not override expressions of popular will. Syriza’s leaders have been wary of politicising citizen movements not only ...”