“... their parasitic absence of function and common cultural ideal, la cour et la ville merged into a self-contained, homogenous society.’ That’s a lot to learn from a few key words, and the interest here is precisely in the social distinctions that can be drawn through close attention to language in context. Words are historical witnesses, we uncover their ...”

“... more admired than the poem itself, which nevertheless is superior to them. Even the frighteningly self-absorbed stony old man of the famous frontispiece is not really adequate to Blake’s magnificent conception.’ I want immediately to quarrel with the judgment, and in any case to say that extracting the frontispiece from the overall texture of images in ...”

“... the larger-scale A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010), reviewed in these pages by Will Self. Hatherley confesses to ‘nostalgia for the future’ in Militant Modernism, ‘a longing for the fragments of the half-hearted postwar attempt at building a new society, an attempt that lay in ruins by the time I was born’. It makes sense that he should ...”

“... be sure Chaucer committed. So my dark suspicions about the genre of biography may be rather self-serving. Not all literary biography fits the rubric of popular history. Some of it appeals more to the submerged fantasist, hoarder of dangerous titbits, or amateur detective. Merkin enjoys Panthea Reid’s account of Woolf as a guilty secret: she obviously ...”

“... adrift with her two children, evoked in the wastes of Aftermath. The memoir was criticised for self-pity: here anger has taken up all the space where pity might cling on. The production – and the text – set aside the restless to and fro debate and shared anguish about the depths of human suffering and especially women’s sufferings that keeps ...”

“... to me. If you’re under three and over ninety, okay. Anything in between, it indicates a loss of self-esteem. You’re in the way of the mopping, besides. Some supermarket spillage, soup or blood or butter, and before you can say, ‘It wasn’t me,’ a bell shrills: the cleaners are charging in with their yellow signs on legs, DANGER: MOPPING IN ...”

“... front – for that is increasingly the common sense of many economists and others, including the self-declared democratic socialist Bernie Sanders – but in his desire to change foreign policy. His criticism of the absurdly high level of military expenditure is echoed by some prominent US economists in relation to their own country. Joseph Stiglitz (a ...”

“... I stretched out my arms – and lost sight of my own fingers.’ The coming apart of the social self is accompanied by imagery of bodies being destroyed and returned to nature. There are stories from other refugees of children tortured to death by having their eyes gouged out, executions where the victims’ mouths and noses were filled with dirt until they ...”

“... and his lips flapping and his face squinching into clownish expressions of mockery and rage and self-congratulation. He picked as a running mate buttoned-up patriarchy, the lean, crop-haired, perpetually tense Mike Pence, who actually has experience in government, signing eight anti-abortion bills in his four years as governor of Indiana, and going after ...”

“... in an attempt to find a legal justification, offers an opportunity to explore the inquiry’s self-restraint.In his introductory words Chilcot explains that the inquiry ‘has not expressed a view on whether military action was legal’. With no lawyer among its members, and no legal counsel to assist it, the inquiry chose to sidestep this delicate ...”

“... each musician in his 14-piece ensemble to be a soloist – did not exist as a score but as a self-assembly kit consisting of loose-leaf instrumental parts, including a part for a conductor whose arms rotated like the hands of a clock, but whose movements had no bearing on the sound produced by the players. Each performance was different: Cage said he ...”

“... which was brokered in 1993, brought the first intifada to an end, established limited Palestinian self-governance in parts of Gaza and the West Bank, outsourced to the new Palestinian government many of Israel’s responsibilities as an occupying power, and immunised Israel against the forms of protest to which it had previously been ...”

“... Kit Martin found a solution. He began dividing houses, starting with Gunton Park in Norfolk, into self-contained apartments that preserved the house and allowed the purchasers of two or three-bedroom maisonettes to luxuriate in extensive grounds. It became rather smart to give one’s address as The Laundry or The Old Kitchen. It is now the names of weekend ...”

“... some kind of opportunity for personal development. The pension reform wasn’t dreamed up in a self-help seminar, though. It followed earlier efforts to reshape the Russian pension system in line with Western norms. As long ago as the mid-1990s, IMF and World Bank officials had pressed the Yeltsin government to make changes, but at the time – mired in an ...”

“... its destruction. This would hardly be a new project, but Lamartine approached it with the immense self-confidence of a man who has seen that a fine speech before a turbulent parliament can alter the course of history. Even so, his story is also always aware of practicalities – money, travel arrangements, and social proprieties. An American visitor to ...”