“... between ‘high’ and popular art, and most of all his insistence on the malleability of the self – are those which Modernism provided in embryo. Whereas the bits of Brecht that are distinctly un-Post-Modern – usefulness, usedness, simplicity, weight – are precisely those elements of Modernism whose absence defines the difference.Like Jameson, I ...”

“... such as Iran, Mexico or Venezuela were zones of unionisation, democratic activism and sovereign self-assertion. Given the geopolitics of the Middle East, the prominence of Opec and the power of the oil lobby in the US, it isn’t surprising that oil-based monomaterialist theories of modernity prevail. But transition theory may not have become so dominant ...”

“... happy result of this might be that libel lawyers as a breed would lose some of the pomposity and self-regard which ooze from every page of this rambling, ill-written farrago of reminiscences drawn from cases in which Mr Carter-Ruck’s clients are paragons of virtue and dignity and his opponents are either left-wing troublemakers or irresponsible publishers ...”

“... us who were at [the university of] Basle have come to nothing.’ This may not have been baseless self-deprecation: an acquaintance warned him that ‘I have never seen students rise. They are always more remiss and prone to slacking.’ Rütiner noted ruefully how this had been said ‘in a harsh tone, as if they were reproaching me. From then on I was more ...”

“... tools of measurement, models or paradigms, and laws. The first and third of these are more or less self-evident: one set of things we call ‘rulers’ provide consistent measurements of lines, while the other, lawmakers, impose consistency in the judgment of behaviour. Both display and encourage what we call ‘regularity’. But the second of these three ...”

“... in these ten or twelve pages is of the sort that Chekhov put in the mouth of the dissatisfied and self-critical young writer Treplev in The Seagull:The description of a moonlit night is long and stilted. Trigorin has worked out a process of his own, and descriptions are easy for him. He writes that the neck of a broken bottle lying on the bank glimmered in ...”

“... the rewilding of its urban spaces along the Mediterranean coast and the restoration of Egyptian self-rule. The girdle-wearers, ‘being followers of Typhon’ (the Greek name for Seth, the Egyptian god of Chaos), ‘will slay themselves’, he says, imagining the stench of unburied corpses pervading the city. His oracle is both a political prophecy about ...”

“... them a new life.Shame’s unforgiving, Old Testament misogyny, which dictates Rena’s willing self-abasement, also rules out any credible male characterisation. That Taribo goes to great lengths to frame Rena’s shallow husband, in the process jeopardising everything he has worked for, is hardly in keeping with the portrait of a drug baron who thinks ...”

“... been bound up) is not always seen for what it is: one aspect of the slow development of human self-knowledge, as reflected by historical changes in the way we evaluate our place in the world and the universe in which we find ourselves. The implications of these changes extend far beyond geography: they permeate our social and political structures, our ...”

“... works met Greenberg’s criteria for Modernist painting – as well as being flat, it should be self-contained, objective, immediate – but by means that Greenberg found utterly alien to such painting: the kitschy images and found things of mass culture. If anything, Lichtenstein forced together the poles of fine art and commercial design with more sparks ...”

“... with Carter and Pollard, all Oxbridge erudition and easy privilege. For this new generation of self-styled ‘Biblio Boys’, Wise was an object of snobbish ridicule, a pompous old bore who would harangue colleagues with his ‘ugly cockney voice’. At heart, then, this is a story about class and status. Books, for Wise, meant social currency as much as ...”

“... unpaved campo; ringed around it were pawnshops, butchers, a bakery, a tavern. The community was self-governing, a ghetto republic within the Most Serene Republic: the Jews looked after their own finances, legislation, security, sanitation. Jewish confraternities emerged to feed and clothe the poor, to care for orphans and the sick. The earliest inhabitants ...”

“... exhibited cards with coloured symbols on them, surrounded by interpretative texts based on his own self-made hermeneutic system, creating a symbolic iconography, an ever-expanding text. In many of the documentary films and videos there was a similar tendency, with emphasis on the gap between what happened and what is recorded – the contradictory and ...”

“... revolutionary diplomats, the chief target of the hostage takers, describing Afrouz as ‘a sleek, self-satisfied opportunist with a paunch’. The deputy press attaché, Abbas Lavasani, who was to be shot in the head and his body dumped outside the embassy door, thereby precipitating the SAS assault, is dismissed as a ‘spy’ and ‘fundamentalist ...”

“... respectful of and sympathetic to his protagonists while always alert to the possibility of self-misrepresentation. Yet the liminal terrain of Gulag medicine also complicates the popular binary between ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ in states that use terror against their citizens. Solzhenitsyn would have it that, as collaborators in the ...”