“... with the Chicago Wobblies of his youth. Rexroth, who was the kind of superb polymath only a self-taught man can be, read enormously widely, and his conversation was full of haphazard erudition, scientific, philological, historical, metaphysical, as well as literary. Out of this reading he developed a sense that all the world’s cultures were in a way ...”

“... as they were by the Inquisitors. ‘Some of us think she is crazy,’ remarked one woman of the self-declared benandante Florida Basili. Few seem to have had an established place in the community. Most were poor, some destitute or women afflicted by domestic problems. Even their name, benandanti, seems sometimes to have become conflated with ...”

“... Nevertheless, strong government and the economic recovery it might bring with it are not self-evidently ends in themselves. Schumpeter was no doubt right, he certainly cleared the air, in saying that ‘socialism’ is whatever works economically to the larger advantage. But he was disingenuous in also claiming that it was culturally ...”

“... box office takings – can be achieved. Art galleries that are privately funded (the Saatchi) are self-evidently worse equipped to give the public a chance to exercise discretion than state-funded galleries (the Hayward) that can put on and charge for shows at a rate that might reflect what people think a trip to a gallery is worth. State-subsidised repertory ...”

“... Hindley may want to present herself as a changed person, a different woman, a stranger to her past self, but the pittura infamante, a piece of the machinery of fame, traps her in its fixed semblance. That Harvey chose a four-year-old – not an older child, the age of Hindley’s victims – to model the hands that stick to Myra’s face shows how strongly the ...”

“... they often have the qualities at once of profound representational power and of equally profound self-consciousness that we have associated with the dynamic of that emotion. Few readers will fail to be impressed, too, by the sophistication of his analysis of what happens in the mind of the young Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale. It is equally ...”

“... of the Groundnuts Order is not freakish; it simply employs the 20th-century mode to the point of self-parody. In very recent years, however, things have begun perceptibly to change. The influence of the Plain English campaign, championed by Margaret Thatcher, has begun to be noticeable throughout Whitehall, and some truly simple legislation has started to ...”

“... did not care.’ We were ‘stooges’, deceived ‘because we wanted to be’. There is too much self-flagellation here. It does not go without saying that the Volga Germans were no real danger. The greatest war in history was raging; loss of the line of the Volga might well have meant defeat. Nazi armies were doing far worse things on Russian ...”

“... applauded Nasreen’s outspokenness, but many also deplored what they perceived as her self-promotion, her disregard for journalistic accuracy, and her tendency to denigrate the efforts of other women writers and activists. Older women’s rights advocates disapproved of the ‘softcore’ pornographic quality of much of her writing, which they ...”

“... passions, carrying on, in much altered but no less fruitful form, the psychoanalytic tradition of self-analysis. Hobson, though, is too well-trained a scientist to rest his case for the activation-synthesis model on anecdotal interpretations of individual dreams. He and his colleagues have sought to make dream analysis a genuine science. Over the past ...”

“... greatest story-teller’, an entertaining interviewee, a value-for-money guest on talk-shows. Self-help, patriotism and the game for the game’s sake are his constant themes. Mrs Thatcher overcomes doubts about his ‘judgment’ and appoints him the Party’s deputy chairman. Then the second disaster: he offers £2000 to a prostitute so that she may go ...”

“... be something to be said for McLuhan’s way of doing and saying things: that his concealments and self-deceptions and errors were almost necessary to getting the truth, or its possibility, across. And one can’t help thinking he would have enjoyed the computer-generated stock-market collapse last October. Communications satellites were not yet ...”

“... him to his early sense of what he must give up in order to live, he achieves a brilliant feat of self-understanding. The almost spoken almost gets said in his concluding remarks about love. ‘A perfect love is founded on despair,’ he says, quoting from his sonnets: This paradox is condensed and rhetorical: to get at the truth in it we must expand it a ...”

“... Beach case showed New York criminal justice at its best.’ After a few hundred words of gloating self-congratulation on the Daniel come to judgment theme, the editorial concluded: ‘All over urban America, economic shifts, crime and disintegration of neighbourhoods feed racist fears and reactions. That was the atmosphere in which the Howard Beach tragedy ...”

“... in a novel that divided its attention more evenly. ‘Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self,’ Vera reflects, in the calm at the end of the book, when she has left white suburbia. She has thrown over the old life, just as the old politics has been overthrown, and in her connection with the land rights activist, who embodies her own hopes as well ...”