“... Genet, Robbe-Grillet was now to be found in second-hand bookshops. Passionately anti-clerical, a self-confessed sadist, Robbe-Grillet had always relished his unofficial title, the ‘pope of the nouveau roman’, but now the joke was wearing thin: no one wants to lead a church without a congregation. His parting gesture was to preside over a black mass. He ...”

“... were in their dying phases and both Armenians and Azerbaijanis discovered the idea of national self-determination’. Since then, dubious historical narratives and the jargon of 19th-century nationalism have been deployed to reinforce a mutual antipathy.Nagorno-Karabakh​ – Nagorny, Russian for ‘mountainous’; Kara-Bakh, Turkish for ‘black ...”

“... but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man of unerring self-discipline and caution, bipartisan to a fault, should have provoked such ferocious white resistance – fanned by the man who questioned the validity of his birth certificate and then succeeded him as president. This most eloquent champion of ...”

“... it presents the home as a redoubt against public danger but because it explores the impulse to self-impose a siege and accept a tightly monitored environment. All the more impressive, then, that it pushes back against the morbid and precautionary aspects of lockdown.It did no harm to the film’s reception that the insecurities induced by Covid were ...”

“... a manner shaped for other purposes by the Augustan satirists, urbanely interventionist rather than self-effacing, and designed to indicate authorial management rather than to induce an illusion of unprocessed reality. This is even true of Shamela, which is written in Richardson’s letter-form and thus ostensibly cuts out the author. It is an example of a ...”

“... in any of these three conditions means, straightforwardly, diminution of the chances of democratic self-determination. In Britain, the block vote in the Labour Party provides a notorious instance of the first; the corporate finance and tycoon press of the Conservative Party a flagrant example of the second. But uniting the two parties is their exploitation of ...”

“... we are told, ‘to be one of the “few” Jewish reprisals ... after years of almost unbelievable self-restraint.’ In fact, there was no ‘British investigation’, and the comment about ‘self-restraint’ was made by a British politician in 1939: as the massacre occurred in 1948, it is unlikely that he had Deir Yassin ...”

“... Joan Bakewell said when I asked her about him. ‘And sexually many of those men lived in a self-contained culture.’ Bakewell was working as a studio manager in those days and she saw how available and how willing many of the young people were. ‘People were at the top of their form and many were jubilantly having affairs,’ she says. ‘The ...”

“... yet elusive aspects of cultural change is the way certain ideals and arguments acquire an almost self-evident power at particular times, just as others come to seem irrelevant or antiquated and largely disappear from public debate. In the middle of the 18th century, to describe a measure as ‘displaying the respect that is due to rank’ was a commonplace ...”

“... his journals, which Segev quotes at length, he revealed ‘a capacity for sensitive and courageous self-examination and a willingness to undertake it’. He knew that the national salvation he promised his people spelled national destruction for another. He had little compassion for those who stood in the way of his ambitions: the Palestinians, above all, but ...”

“... chair; while terms like ‘splitting’, ‘scotomisation’ and ‘derealisation’ (mental self-blinding) slowly crept into Freud’s late vocabulary as he began to confront minds whose only recourse in the face of mental pain was to take flight from themselves. No surprise that such a conference should find itself brushing up against the worst of ...”

“... Johnson loved the play. But neoclassical principles generally demand clear form and order, and a self-evident morality, and these are choices that Hamlet has always been able to frustrate or violate. This restricted sense of the civilised re-emerged last century with Modernism, which looked for abstraction in works of art, emphasising openness to ...”

“... social democratic reformism in the notion of Folkhemmet, the People’s Home, in Sweden; Nazism, self-described as die Bewegung, the Movement, in Germany; and in the United States the dynamic role of American communism in the unions and among intellectuals, forcing labour and social security reforms on a Democratic administration that of its own volition ...”

“... the point at which computers become more intelligent than human beings; learn to self-program and self-improve; do so at speed and at scale; and lead humanity to a new era of, to use the latest hot term, abundance. Artificial general intelligence, or artificial superintelligence, creates a new era of cheap ...”

“... century, included the history and the geography as well as the literature and the language of this self-conscious and consciously taught nation. In the universities, the major humane interests were still to be satisfied in Classics, which had also its own strict linguistic disciplines running through from the private schools. English, in that university ...”