“... allow has an urgent religious significance. She cites the influence of Danah Zohar’s The Quantum Self which, like other popular treatments of quantum mechanics, offers an appealingly fresh and holistic account of the world around us, finding enormous significance in the tiniest particle and the most obscure event. To writers with an aestheticised Christian ...”

“... to shareholders capital they ought to keep and re-invest, so the prophecy of slow growth becomes self-fulfilling. The net result is that we consume too much, and invest and produce too little. This is all perfectly true, but much of the time Hutton gives the impression that he thinks it all began with Thatcher. At other points he writes that these have been ...”

“... sense of decline: a widely-shared view that British social and political institutions are self-evidently defective – a view held more intensely since Mrs Thatcher’s efforts to legitimate a reactionary version of them are generally held to have failed. In 1942 it was difficult not to be impressed by Britain’s comparative social integration and ...”

“... His less controversial conclusion is that ‘the agenda of late 19th-century sexual liberation was self-servingly devised by men, and spurious in its concern for women.’ Among Place’s contemporaries, only William Cobbett disagreed with him, believing that the change was no more than ‘modesty in the word and grossness in the thought’, as proven by the ...”

“... right words in the wrong place, and vice versa’. These pieces were regularly returned in the self-addressed stamped envelope that the Writers and Artists Yearbook advised. Lately, when they plopped through the letterbox, Father didn’t open them, but tore them up, stamped on the pieces and swore in Urdu, cursing the English who, he was convinced, were ...”

“... metal version of the faceted columns he more frequently made in wood – as, for instance, in the self-portrait on he opposite page) cannot match the concenrated power of the studio assemblages. It is the temple – which would have included he three Birds in Space (bronze, black marble, and white marble) already in the possession of the Maharaja of ...”

“... dinners, for example – have turned into masquerade costumes, often worn with the uneasy self-consciousness that afflicts all uncustomary public appearances, and often selected without the sureness of taste that marks everyday choices. Gone, too, is any immense difference, discernible from a great distance, in everyday dress among social classes and ...”

“... adroit promotion of an embryo Indian empire as the heartland of world religion, and Merry’s self-promotion as ‘della Crusca’, Hannah Cowley’s as ‘Anna Matilda’ – two strangers play-acting ‘romantic’ passion in a poetic correspondence published in the magazine The World. Equally uncomfortably, McGann suffers the 1820s to drag on for eight ...”

“... than it was in the days of Johnson, Kissinger, Reagan and Shultz. That hardly seems a matter for ...”

“... because he wasn’t clubbable: as John Biffen, an admirer, noted sadly, he was ‘devastatingly self-contained’. But, far more, it was the speech that had put him beyond the pale, not only because of the allegations of racism which dogged him for ever after but because the Parliamentary élite does not lightly forgive those who summon up the genie of ...”

“... New Historicism has suffered. The Purpose of Playing is burdened, for example, with one of those self-important prefaces which feels required to situate itself within a totalising, idealist history of all the intellectual tendencies within the American academy since the advent of Theory, and is full of passages like this: in the discipline of ...”

“... then sit up and sing once more. Nor does Mitchell exempt their art. Their lyrics, he says, were self-pitying, their vocal techniques ‘tear-jerking’, their famed hoarseness the product not of soul but of alcoholism. Alcohol, indeed, is a major theme of this book. Obviously a light drinker himself, Mitchell regards alcohol use as a product of the need to ...”

“... Journals, to ‘a kind of paranoia that only momentarily persuaded my simultaneously lucid sane self that I was watched by shadowy vigilante groups’, Gascoyne later dissociated himself from the doomed Euro-Visionary tradition. In his Journals he wrote: ‘Being still alive and re-installed at last on the safer shore of recovered mental balance, I am ...”

“... as ‘irrational’. According to Lord Irvine, it is ‘the constitutional imperative of judicial self-restraint which must inform judicial decision-making in public law’. He also criticised recent rulings that require tougher judicial scrutiny of decisions affecting human rights, while maintaining his support for making the European Human Rights Convention ...”

“... circle but hopelessly excluded from it – is wholly deaf to the note of frustration and self-disgust which often underlies his desperate rhetorical clowning. Nonsense, though, can offer a nightmare vision of a senseless universe just as readily as an idyllic escape into pure play (at its best it may do both at once: The Goon Show was both a ...”