“... raised with the same nonchalance he had used in setting up a bookie joint or slipping a tail.’ Self-interest is his motive for leaving as for joining the Mob. The difficulty of our taking Henry as a hero in the approved pattern makes for a queasy unfamiliarity in the film’s stance, and reaction to GoodFellas has betrayed confusion and resentment on this ...”

“... somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes’. The Gothic situation is always a self-circularising time-warp from which, however, the reader has broken free, carrying with him, as it were, the now emancipated girl and the radical humanist lifestyle. Terror is cosily isolated, enjoyed because left behind. Politically speaking, there is an ...”

“... set in London, the alien city to which many Scots were driven by joblessness in the Twenties. The self-consciously brittle tone recalls Lewis’s Apes of God, early Huxley, and Eliot’s young man carbuncular. There are daring-for-the-time references to casual sexual intercourse, Stopesian contraceptive devices, cheap silken undergarments, pick-ups in Lyons ...”

“... our slippery language is honourable: but when it leads him to such impractical stringencies, it is self-defeating. Moreover, what we call ‘stringencies’ may as well be called, if we shift the focus only a little, ‘self-indulgences’. In some of the earlier and less strenuous essays here, he shows he can recognise with ...”

“... now recognise, in G.S. Fraser’s anthology Poetry Now (1956). It appeared again that same year in Robert Conquest’s anthology New Lines, and I fear I did not then recognise in it, as I do now, perhaps the finest poem in that volume, and certainly the most surprising. It is, I suppose and hope, well-known: but it isn’t famous – as it deserves to be. It ...”

“... to social discourse, in all spheres of moral life. Such an account of the latitude for self-determination within the grip of the social and the discursive is of some practical moment for current controversy over sexual ethics, simply because history puts paid to the idea that an ethics of sexual behaviour can ever be grounded in empirical claims as ...”

“... no word for understatement. She won prizes but less international recognition than her warm friend Robert Lowell, who consistently celebrated her: Dear Elizabeth, Half New-Englander, half fugitive Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board – Unable to settle anywhere, or live Our usual roaring sublime. Elizabeth Bishop certainly never roared. In this ...”

“... the British reoccupied the East India Company’s settlement in Calcutta. In June a force led by Robert Clive deposed Siraj after defeating him in a battle near Plassey (Palashi), helped by the defection of the nawab’s key advisers and financial backers to the British side. The first account of the ‘Black Hole’ – as the room where the soldiers were ...”

“... and any attunement to religion has been filtered out. The effect is to make him not just self-taught – as he was known to be – but self-made, and to turn him into an unconsoled scrutiniser of mortality, a sort of outsider artist. It’s true that one of his teatrini depicting the effects of syphilis is ...”

“... this a precocious understanding of the value of the autographed work; or a piece of metaphorical self-dismemberment?) What she wants now is to become a hybrid of Flip and the land artist Robert Smithson, who made his mark on Utah’s topography with his immense coiling earthwork, Spiral Jetty. As Reno explains to her New ...”

“... in holy orders: ‘They were the last people you would expect to be converted to the cause of self-pampering.’ Whatever the reason for their failure, the history of the Cambridge baths is a nice case of the ambivalence of the modern world’s engagement with the ancient. It shows the combination of enthusiasm and lack of interest, learned reconstruction ...”

“... sick with a cough and a temperature. By the end of the week, she has recovered, but we ask her to self-isolate for 14 days.5 March. The UK records its first death from Covid-19. In London, there have been four confirmed cases.7 March. I spend five hours in the middle of the day with the choir I run in Highbury in north London, rehearsing for a concert at the ...”

“... by his widow with the customary bottle of champagne and went into service as a pleasure cruiser in Robert Ley’s Strength through Joy organisation, which provided ‘classless’ holidays for (some) members of the Volksgemeinschaft, subsidised by money seized from the trade unions. In the remaining years of peace it cruised the Mediterranean and the Norwegian ...”

“... time, personal and external constraints in behaviour became impersonal and internalised, until self-control, in the form of a new ‘economy of instincts’, became automatic – a process akin to the one Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, when a religiously rooted attitude to work gradually became detached from its ...”

“... Constitution’s language raises such questions but does not provide answers. Nor is the document self-enforcing. Some provisions, like the free speech and equal protection clauses, were violated for decades before being invigorated in the 20th century. Others, like the guarantee of a republican form of government, have been entirely forgotten. During and ...”