1. One episode in which Loki plays his familiar role is that from the Prose Edda centred on a ring stolen by Loki from Andvari the dwarf. As usual, Loki has got the gods into trouble, by killing one of the sons of Hreidmar, and steals the ring to buy off Hreidmar’s wrath. But Andvari places a curse on anyone who owns the ring, and this leads to one of Hreidmar’s two remaining sons, Fafnir, killing his brother and turning into a monster. Fafnir is eventually killed by Sigurd the Volsung, giving rise to the saga which was to inspire Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen and, less directly, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It is apt that the image of a cursed ring symbolising the power of the ego should thus have originated in association with Loki.

2. From a conversation with Beethoven in 1824 recorded by Johann August Stumpff. Rossini at this time was at the height of his fame. Beethoven was still to write the final sequence of quartets, stretching the framework of the classical style to its ultimate imaginative extreme, which brought his life’s work to such a perfect resolution.

3. Lady Isobel Vane, Mrs Wood’s heroine, having been left poor and alone by her father’s death, marries the ambitious young lawyer who has bought the family’s home East Lynne, even though she has already fallen in love with another man. Despite giving birth to three children, she feels neglected by her husband, whom she falsely suspects of being unfaithful. She eventually elopes to France with her lover, by whom she has an illegitimate daughter, but he abandons her. Isobel and her daughter become the victims of a railway accident, which kills the child and leaves Isabel hideously crippled and disfigured. Desperate to see her children again, and disguised by her maiming, Isabel implausibly wins the post of governess in her old home. She first has to endure the sight of her former husband living happily with his new wife, and then has to watch her son falling so ill that, despite her loving care, he dies (‘dead, and never called me mother’ was introduced in the stage version). Isobel then dies herself, but not before she has revealed her true identity to her former husband. Naturally he forgives her to provide a ‘happy ending’.

Novels of this genre, so popular in the 1860s, were satirised in W. S. Gilbert’s musical comedy A Sensation Novel (1871), in which, foreshadowing Pirandello by half a century, the stock characters of a melodramatic novel step outside their fictional roles, to comment scornfully on what a silly piece of make-believe they have become caught up in.

4. Another instance can be seen in Wells’s short story The Time Machine, where the society of the future is shown as divided between the ‘above the line’ daylight world inhabited by the infantile, pleasure-loving, fruit-eating Eloi, and the subterranean ‘below the line’ world, in which the flesh-eating Morlocks live in darkness, working at machines, before coming out at night to terrorise and prey on the Eloi. As a late nineteenth-century Socialist, Wells would probably have seen this as a parable of how the division of society between the privileged, effete upper-classes and the industrial proletariat would eventually separate them, in effect, into separate species.

5. One artistic product of the 1920s which reflected this in its own way was Ravel’s Bolero (1922), musically expressing the need of any pattern based on fantasy to create a rising spiral of sensations. The same tune, almost indefinitely repeated to a hypnotically insistent rhythm, rises ever louder through a Dream Stage, but towards what? How could Ravel bring his fantasy pattern to a climax and a resolution? In the closing bars we hear how, in desperate pursuit of that elusive climax, he is finally driven to change key (Frustration Stage). This only makes the search for a climax even more frantic. The piece falls into a series of jagged discords (Nightmare Stage), before finally collapsing into the cacophony by which the fantasy destroys itself. By such a pattern does fantasy demonstrate the way in which it ultimately develops its own ‘death wish’.

6. Interestingly this switch was unconsciously foreshadowed by the great Soviet film-maker Sergei Eistenstein, whose Alexander Nevsky in 1938 had returned to the Russian Middle Ages to show a devout Russian king eventually leading his people to a heroic victory over Germanic invaders from the West. Eisenstein’s previous films, such as The Battleship Potemkin, had been largely Communist propaganda, exalting the triumphs of the Bolshevik revolutionaries.

7. It was telling that, after the first nuclear test at Alamagordo, on 16 July 1945, Robert J. Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, resorted to religious imagery to express his awe. Quoting Shiva from the Baghavadh Gita, he exclaimed ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’

8. Greene’s two most overtly ‘Catholic’ novels – The Power and the Glory (1938) and The Heart of the Matter (1948) – centre on a hero who has in reality lost his faith but clings on in desperation to an idea of Catholicism, as embodying the Self with which he no longer has any living contact. When it comes to a final test, Greene’s ‘whisky priest’ in The Power and the Glory faces the firing squad unable to pray. In The Heart of the Matter, Scobie, the policeman whose life has fallen apart, escapes the problems he has brought on himself by suicide, which his Church teaches is the ultimate mortal sin. In each case Greene tries to end his story with a positive ‘Catholic’ twist. Despite the Church’s apparent defeat in the priest’s execution by an atheist regime, the novel ends with the secret arrival of a new priest, to show that the Church goes on forever. When Scobie dies, the book ends with a priest saying he was sure that Scobie ‘really loved God’, while Scobie’s wife agrees that ‘he certainly loved no one else’. Apart from these sentimental conclusions, the picture of human nature given by the two novels is unrelievedly bleak. Their characters are shown as confused or empty, lost in a moral twilight. In later years Greene abandoned his attempt to use ‘Catholicism’ as an image of ‘saving grace’ in his books, and, in proclaiming sympathy for various Communist regimes, appeared to have switched his sentimental projection of the ‘Self’ from Catholicism to a fuzzy Marxism.

9. Plato’s original version was: ‘A change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard to all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions’ (The Republic, Book IV).

10. Another feature of Lady Chatterley echoed in other novels and plays by ‘lower-class’ writers in the late 1950s, was the way it centred on Lawrence’s fantasising about his socially ‘below the line’ hero dominating an aristocratic ‘above the line’ heroine. An important ingredient in Look Back in Anger was the verbal raping by Osborne’s assertively ‘lower-class’ hero of his submissive ‘upper-class’ wife. Similarly John Braine in Room at the Top fantasised about his ambitious young working-class hero sweeping off her feet and dominating the millionaire’s daughter he was set on marrying (an echo of Stendhal’s fantasising about his hero Sorel sexually humiliating Mathilde in Le Rouge et Le Noir).

11. Nothing better reflected the changing mood of these years when the Sixties fantasy was at its height than the way the words of the pop songs of the period reflected the five stages of the fantasy cycle. Early Beatles songs, such as ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please, Please Me’, expressed the mood of an Anticipation Stage. The projected anima was still to be won. The Dream Stage, as their fame took off in 1963, was expressed in the child-like euphoria of songs such as ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ (the girl was theirs, the anima had been won). By 1964 and early 1965, as the strain of their fame and new life-style began to tell, the mood changed to one of frustration (‘A Hard Day’s Night’) and loss (‘Help!’). The Frustration Stage, as the dreamed-of resolution proved ever more elusive, was never better expressed than in the Rolling Stones’ 1965 hit ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’. Shortly afterwards, the Nightmare Stage (now fuelled in America by the growing real-life nightmare of Vietnam) inspired a despairing American hit-song proclaiming ‘We’re on the eve of destruction’. This was followed, as Britain’s chief pop-craze in the autumn of 1965, by the frantic, auto-destructive guitar-smashing of The Who, as they screamed out in ‘My Generation’ how ‘I wanna die before I get old’. In three years, the fantasy had travelled from naive and euphoric anticipation to death wish.

Although there was a general tendency for the films, plays and novels of the time to become more violent and sexually explicit, and for their narratives and imagery to become more fragmented and surreal (e.g., the Beatles films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, The Knack, What’s New Pussycat?), there were of course exceptions. Two major Hollywood successes of these years were My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965), based on more conventional musicals dating from the earlier tradition of the 1950s.

12. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: What Happened to the American Dream (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961). His epigraph was taken from the Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch: ‘Technology ... the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.’

13. Solzhenitsyn offered his analysis in a speech at Harvard University in June 1978.

14. This was well illustrated by one of the books which helped to inspire the ‘women’s movement’, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970). The book laid all its emphasis on the ability of women to compete with men in terms of the ‘masculine’ functions of the psyche, while dismissing the ‘feminine’ functions as unimportant. Greer was eager to claim, for instance, that women could outperform men in ‘cognitive abilities like counting, mathematical reasoning, spatial cognition, abstract reasoning, set-breaking and restructuring’. She followed this by listing women who had successfully competed with men in the business world, and like other feminists of the time she laid great emphasis on the ‘clitoral orgasm’, centred on the female equivalent of the male sex organ. But of the ‘feminine values’, Greer was witheringly scornful. Women who became nurses, for instance, were only fooled by men into ‘feeling good because they are relieving pain’ so that they could be overworked and underpaid (which left them ‘tired, resentful and harried’). As for the intuitive function which is crucial to objective understanding, she dismissed this in typically ‘pseudo-masculine’ terms as no more than ‘a faculty for observing tiny insignificant aspects of behaviour and forming an empirical conclusion which cannot be syllogistically examined’. Greer unconsciously revealed the roots of her own difficulty in relating positively to either the ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ components of her personality by describing how she was the child of a weak, self-centred father and a domineering mother. She was thus not provided by either of her parents with a mature gender model.

15. In many ways the emergence of this collectivist new orthodoxy recalled Plato’s description in Book VIII of The Republic of the final stages of his political cycle where, as ‘democracy’ becomes increasingly obsessed with the ‘rights’ of those below the line, it mutates into ‘tyranny’. There were many signs of a new phase of ‘tyranny’ appearing in western societies at the end of the twentieth century, not least in the increasingly technocratic nature of government, manifested, for instance, in the rise of the European Union.

16. A rare exception was the massacre by which the scriptwriters eventually ended Dynasty. The origins of using the appeal of stories to keep an audience spellbound in this way went back to the nineteenth century, when magazines serialised novels by authors such as Dickens or Hardy in regular instalments, each ending on some highpoint of emotional suspense to ensure that readers would buy the next issue. Certain authors developed this technique for getting their readers hooked by producing a whole sequence of novels centred around the same group of characters. In this sense Trollope’s Palliser novels constituted high-grade ‘soap opera’, as later did Galsworthy’s novels about the Forsyte family and Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time.

17. In 2004 a poll carried out among young people by the Anglican Mothers’ Union found that Marge Simpson scored more highly than anyone else, real or fictional, as ‘the best mother in public life’. As an ideal role model, she was admired for her ‘down-to-earth approach’, for the way she held her family together and for her advice to her children such as ‘listen to your heart, not the voices in your head’ (The Times, 17 March 2004).

18. The heart of the Israeli/Palestinian problem lay in that ego-Self confusion which led the Jews so rigidly to identify their collective identity with race and religion. Although Israel was set up as a ‘democracy’, it thus could not develop into a liberal society based on that principle of assimilation which would allow its two main racial groups gradually to come together (as in other societies across the world where different races and cultures had eventually achieved a modus vivendi). The exclusion of the Arabs inevitably set up a classic confrontation between irreconcilable ‘opposites’, each of which, according to the archetypal pattern, was driven to become ever more extreme: the Israelis in their relentless assertion of dominance and expansion into the Palestinian lands surrounding the original territory of Israel, the Palestinians in their increasingly desperate and suicidal opposition to the ruling power. This in turn polarised the outside world into two camps, supporting each side, creating an impasse which, according to the archetype, offered no hope of resolution other than some eventual catastrophe.