“... black bourgeoisie the Garland men are noted for their reserve, outward propriety and aristocratic self-regard. Talcott has spent his life living up to the Garland ideal and is expected to redeem the Garland family name. He followed his father into the law and teaches at their shared alma mater, Elm Harbor (a lightly fictionalised Yale Law School). Unlike his ...”

“... changed so profoundly by illness or accident that each called into question the solidity of the self. We were not one, continuous, indivisible whole, but instead, hundreds of separate subsystems, with changes in any one sufficient to disperse the provisional confederation into unrecognisable new countries. Who could take issue with that? No one, at that ...”

“... to negotiate the transfer of power from the British colonial master, only to discover that these self-styled nationalists appeared more intent on sleeping with the master’s daughter than liberating their people: ‘I recall one publicly humiliating instance: a national figure, a truly revered name in a highly sensitive political position. He got so carried ...”

“... cape fell on him. They breathed a sigh of relief. They were rid of the burden.’ Should this self-accusation be read as a comprehensive explanation of the family dynamic and its damage? It lies in the narrative alongside quite different suggestions: there are hints, for instance, of an ugly sexual history between the man and his daughters. A gagging ...”

“... is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark ...”

“... to abstract from my reading a book that would keep me company.’ What began as an exercise in self-edification grew into a 9000-page, 33-volume compendium of everything that exists in the universe, as it appeared from al-Nuwayri’s perspective in 14th-century Cairo: Nihayat al-Arab fi Funun al-Adab, or The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of ...”

“... woman whose protagonist is a nonconforming young man. The two examine childhood, parenthood and self-determination, at a time when true autonomy is rare. The British novel reads like a socialist manifesto: simple workers try to lead honest lives and evil landowners manipulate them; its nuance comes in depictions of the natural environment and its attention ...”

“... of class and inequality to bear on subject matter buried deep in the foundations of America’s self-image, and which might be perceived as conservative. The characters in Olive, Again who uncritically celebrate their Americanness are satirised: the bleak English teacher Mrs Ringrose dressing up as a Pilgrim at Thanksgiving, or the foolish Fergus MacPherson ...”

“... a militant group in the devastation of the post-Oslo moment for those in Gaza to whom promises of self-governance were never made good; the formation of other groups of Palestinians with other tactics and goals; and the history of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for freedom and the right of political ...”

“... of the religiously pluralistic world in which we now live. His interest in excavating evidence of self-professed atheists stands in counterpoint to Lucien Febvre’s celebrated claim that unbelief (l’incroyance) was a philosophical and logical impossibility in the 16th century. The long shadow cast by Febvre’s thesis has not only inhibited serious ...”

“... peers and lawyers who have long experience of human rights cases, argued that the ordinary law of self-defence was a guide to what Israel could lawfully do, which means that, like an individual faced with a threat to their life, a state can do what it needs to do to survive. As Pannick and Macdonald put it, ‘criminal law understands that if people, in ...”

“... people and movements by their position on globalisation. Her use of this term is, she admits, ‘self-consciously anachronistic’. Her interwar ‘globalists’ were often internationalists seeking to promote transnational regulation or co-operation; her ‘anti-globalists’, too, identified as nationalists or socialists (or, worse, National ...”

“... 1960s was among other things a prophetic critique of today’s brutally philistine universities, self-avowed service stations for the capitalist economy.If some theory had revolutionary implications, it was because it pressed that soulless logic through to the humanities themselves. They were no longer to be seen as a preserve of personal value and spiritual ...”

“... Review addressed itself to ‘serious, thoughtful men of all schools, classes and principles’, self-consciously distancing itself from the openly partisan character of most leading periodicals of the time. It made something of a fetish of its political, religious and financial independence, while taking evident pride in its hard-headedness. It ...”

“... anyway, our dragon sits in style atop a glowing treasure-stack, and with the cool, expansive self- possession of his kind, grins extravagantly back at the blaze that enriches ...”