“... funny.I am not a good weeper when people die.There is no false modesty here, more a persistent self-reckoning. As she also liked to say, ‘there are things that I have accomplished and things I failed to do.’Segal’s accomplishments, over eighty years, have long been acknowledged, even if they remain for the most part under the radar. That her books ...”

“... to point to an imaginative hinterland in a detective’s mind, and there’s an element of wry self-reference here. A character in Cover Her Face makes the point: ‘The cultured cop! I thought they were peculiar to detective novels. Congratulations!’ Dalgliesh is at his most predictable in his supposed eccentricity.James would not have claimed the ...”

“... admirably researched and written, and quietly subversive. It asks how much deceit – and how much self-deception on the part of the global anti-apartheid movement – might be revealed by a closer look at the liberation struggle and the dawn of the ‘New South Africa’. Quite a lot, it turns out. Outsiders have been eager to find a moral lesson in the ...”

“... of the Middle Ages. Civilisation recovered, but growth in a world of limits was ultimately self-defeating. The prosperity of the 16th century soon gave way to famine, drought, war and plague. It was only after modern technology unlocked the productive capacities of the earth that society was able to escape this cycle of expansion, crisis and ...”

“... in turning profits but in growing his business and acquiring ever more novel tech companies. His self-aggrandising ‘mine is bigger than yours’ attitude impressed both Trump and Mohammed bin Salman. Barber recounts a meeting between Son and the soon-to-be US president at which Trump showed Son how to replicate his signature combover. Son and bin Salman ...”

“... to be had conducting visitors on medico-spiritual ‘journeys’ of healing, personal growth and self-actualisation under the influence of ayahuasca, cacti and magic mushrooms.Traditionally, it was the shaman who swallowed or sniffed intoxicating plants as a way of gaining access to the world of the spirits, but the new Western clients are focused on their ...”

“... She is definitely not nobody, and the writings collected here are imbued with a calm self-confidence that turns out to be her salient characteristic. It rests on the conviction that she can tell right from wrong. She has always acted accordingly, without any soul-searching or fuss. This is what her Prussian upbringing taught her. Or so she seems ...”

“... play. Keith Ogilvie, Francis Mayne’s lover and exploiter, is always writing to Tariq Ali in his self-serving careerist way, and perhaps it will transpire in novels to come that the latter becomes presenter and producer of Channel 4’s Bandung File: but no one’s sense of Britain will be changed by this, or by the idea that 1968 radicals have to a ...”

“... economic injury.’ Capitalism may deliver the goods, but it does so in a way that undermines the self-esteem and capacity for self-realisation of most people. The inherent ugliness of capitalism ensures that there is a perpetual impetus towards socialism, but contemplation of actually existing socialism perpetually tends ...”

“... irritation. Those who use it are usually complacent or ignorant, or both, and guilty of the covert self-congratulation of those who have drawn prize numbers in the lottery of life. One who uses the term is the Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the phantom Foreign Office in St James’s Square. For reasons of economy or snobbery or ...”

“... that before writers dared to offer to their readership stories which were intended to be wholly self-contained and self-explanatory, they had to have confidence in the ability of these readers to get the hang, rapidly, of a variety of narrative techniques and their effects – something that could only come about as a ...”

“... In time, he lost his journalist’s job. He’d lived in the shadow of his successful father – self-made, writer of ripping yarns, fifty years editor of The Wide World. And we got poorer in a time when dole was not the norm. Later – a short-term job – educational précis took him to London’s technical libraries. I went with him in the ...”

“... opposite: resistance to ‘exported’ foreign domination. Omar Cabezas’s vigorous, funny and self-deprecating account of his four-year odyssey in the mountains of northern Nicaragua as a young guerrilla volunteer expresses the spirit of Sandinismo more fully than any other available work in English. For obvious historical reasons the shelves of English ...”

“... a case of Titania and Bottom!’ The courtship of this super-extraordinary pair – ‘two active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public cause,’ as H.G. Wells characterised them in The New Machiavelli – was the oddest romance in the Fabian calendar and a triumph for Sidney’s policy of gradualism. Beatrice was 34 at the time of their ...”