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“... that were collective. If Gyp’s admiration for Bonaparte and Boulanger was a consequence of self-hatred and a quest for masculinity, how do we explain that same admiration on the part of millions of other male and female Bonapartists and Boulangists? In fact it was common for Legitimists to gravitate to Bonapartism. Many upper-class conservatives were ...”

“... Strip. In 2010 their number will equal ours.’ Yet the real threat lies, surely, in the issue of self-identity and the degree of comprehension – not sympathy but human awareness – of one’s opponents. When Grossman speaks to a settler from Gush Emunim, he finds it hard to understand her: she talks ‘with pain of the sufferings of Israeli Arabs, on whom ...”

“... philosophical questions, notably theories of perception and mental association. Between pride and self-doubt, the author himself declares that most people will not be able to understand this material, and should not try. Across a striking hiatus in MS, we are then led to a vigorous magnification of the imagination as the supreme element of poetry, and an ...”

“... and dispassionate in its logic. It was wrong that the Palestinians were not being prepared for self-government. It was wrong that Palestine had not been granted a seat in the United Nations and wrong, too, that it had been debarred from joining the Arab League. The Arab population was already suffering economically and socially from the effects of Jewish ...”

“... dolls, staring distractedly over each other’s tiny shoulders’. The Pahlavis’ greatest act of self-aggrandisement – the massive binge for world leaders at the great ruins of Persepolis – counted for nothing when the end came. Indeed, the very detritus of the banquet was effortlessly turned by the new regime into a symbol of emptiness. When the Shah ...”

“... more relaxed under a Labour than under a Conservative government lies in the British instinct for self-preservation. The rich are more capable of exercising this instinct than the poor. Better-equipped, better-educated, better able to act on advice from tax consultants, they take a peculiar pleasure in outwitting a Labour government temporarily in ...”

“... And it would all be fun – our own English brand of magic realism – if it were neatly self-sufficient and the pattern of reversals quite harmonious. But not so. Far from being merely playful, The Philosopher’s Pupil reaches out after meaning, and undertakes to deal with such issues as evil, innocence and salvation. So it borrows suggestively ...”

“... is, of course, to reconcile formal diversity with a decorous aesthetic harmony, to create a self-sufficient whole. Appropriately enough, one of his paintings from this period, ‘Fifteen’, was selected by the Gobelins factory as the design for a rug. Kandinsky’s introspective patterns exclude the encroachment of a world outside themselves which ...”

“... Czech word litost – ‘a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self’. The idea isn’t put to much use in the story ‘Litost’, which might suggest that, stripped of its pretensions, it’s not much of an idea. It certainly has an air of the morbus fraudulentus that Chekhov detected in his admirers when they talked to ...”

“... Robert Fergusson died in Edinburgh’s Bedlam on 17 October 1774. He was 24 years old. He had been admitted to the asylum three months before, against his will, because his mother could no longer look after him. Having been persuaded by some friends that he was being taken out in a sedan chair to visit another acquaintance, he was conveyed instead to a cell in the asylum, a sepulchrous building abutting the old city wall ...”

“... is rarely stopped by good men alone. It is more often stopped by grave defects of character and of self-awareness: no one else dares tell such criminals what they need to know. Anyone in search of an object lesson in how to write about crime need look no further than Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter ...”

“... Whether in person or in print, self-consciousness is unsettling. Self-conscious writers, like self-conscious speakers, can’t help betraying that they’re more concerned with their interest in a subject, and the manner which conveys that interest, than in the subject itself ...”

“... that of Suckling or Herrick. Rochester’s is the voice of a man grown so familiar with his own self-destructiveness that it causes him no surprise. The very unstrained quality of his style makes his honesty the more chilling.’ The contribution by the editor of the volume begins with a consideration of the difficulty in distinguishing Rochester’s poems ...”

“... what shape it has (drink has a tendency to make things lose their shape), is between Hannah and Robert, an alcoholic dentist. Alcoholism and dentistry have coincided, more grotesquely, in Kennedy’s fiction before: a desperate character in Everything You Need (1999), a publisher called Jack Grace, visits a sadist in Soho to be administered alcohol ...”

“... mostly within the justice system, between police stations, prisons and courtrooms. The system is self-contained and unaccountable: graduates of the Police Academy are automatically granted a law degree and can move fluidly from police station to prosecutor’s office to judge’s bench. It is inconsistent and unpredictable: judges hand down idiosyncratic ...”