“... out Nixon’s order to fire Cox; Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, followed. Eventually Robert Bork, the solicitor-general and next in the chain of command at Justice, sacked Cox. Ziegler announced the abolition of the special prosecutor’s office. But the public outcry at the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ was so great that Nixon was forced to ...”

“... modern representations, with all their unassimilable detritus, into the singularity of supposedly self-evident identities. If we think of The Island Princess’s ‘Moor priest’ as an ‘imam’, we might all too easily finesse the fact – noted by McManus – that he makes pantheistic references to ‘the gods’ and is addressed as ‘Don Governor’, a ...”

“... millenarian preachers among them) that 1857 marked the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, when Robert Clive asserted East India Company ascendancy in Bengal. In the event, it was gun cartridges that set the mutiny off: they were greased, the sepoys believed, with a blend of cow and pig fat, which would defile both Hindus and Muslims when they bit the ends ...”

“... take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in literature, film and other cultural forms, of those who do write – manuscripts and memos, forms and faxes’. In these days of computers, with authors emailing finished manuscripts to publishers (and for all I know ...”

“... with Ben Jonson, the source of the title, whom Lake eventually gets to, rather like the dragon in Robert Graves’s poem. Jonson had the most turbulent, up and down existence of any of Britain’s greatest writers. It’s just possible that he was the son, born posthumously, of a radically alienated Puritan preacher, ...”

“... the view of a single individual. The author of every utopia invariably takes his vision to be self-evidently the only possible one for the fully rational man. He is necessarily committed to the claim that there is a common purpose behind all human communities, a single goal, which most men have failed to reach because they were not clear-sighted enough to ...”

“... for example, celebrities of the Left. You might want to argue that for this kind of celebrity any self-aggrandisement is offset by the collective good aimed at by their necessarily public commitment. There is a famous psychoanalytic article by Harold Searles called ‘The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy’, in which he lovingly details all the ways ...”

“... into a flat with other young littérateurs, including the future avant-garde poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. He also took a job in a record store, where he met his first wife (they split up after six months) and then his second, Kleo, who introduced him to Bay Area hard-left politics and became his first willing muse. Throughout the 1950s, Dick worked on ...”

“... of moral education. Aristotle started from the premise that ‘the good man should be a lover of self,’ and Jesus took the next step with the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself.’ In the beginning – the assumption goes – you care for nobody except yourself; but then, all being well, your selfishness will start to expand. Through the ...”

“... Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill ...”

“... aesthetic and ethical disposition; violence, and in particular male violence against women; self-harm, especially but not exclusively women’s; and what she pointedly does not call masochism. ‘The mode of violence that gets beneath my skin and really haunts me is not those destructive acts perpetrated by one upon another, for reasons good, bad or ...”

“... In ‘Margaret Fuller Drowned’, a sonnet of the early 1970s, Robert Lowell, whose ancestor James Russell Lowell had been skewered by Fuller’s pen more than a century earlier, sums up what’s commonly known about Fuller. ‘You had everything to rattle the men who wrote,’ he begins, addressing her as ‘the first American woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark ...”

“... mutations she left her own mark on minds and events. It is not too much to say that this strange, self-educated, self-propelled little woman deserves a place among the makers of modern India. The temptation is to draw a continuous line from the first royal charter granted by another warrior queen on the last day of ...”

“... of his life’s work, inextricable from his larger concerns about history, culture and economics. Robert Casillo is therefore entirely correct to say that Pound’s writing raises ‘the problem of evil in literature’ in an especially clear way. ‘For it must be emphasised that Pound’s anti-semitism is quite different from Dostoyevsky’s and ...”

“... historian’s task, in the very subjects it studies, Venturi’s history could not be more unlike Robert Darnton’s new book. Venturi is interested in how great events were understood by great, or at least highly articulate, minds. Darnton is concerned with apparently insignificant events – not the American Revolution but a slaughter of cats – and in ...”