“... off Australia’s west coast on 3 October 1952 also dramatises the yearning and anxiety in British self-consciousness after the war. Soon after the test, the Daily Graphic apostrophised William Penney, the project’s leader: ‘Britain and the Commonwealth owe a debt – almost impossible to repay – to you ... the fact that you and your team have made it ...”

“... studied, affected, textually pleasuring itself in its redundancy; and ditto the luxuriating self-interrogation. This sort of tone is not the main thing Castle means when she cites Edward Said in praise of ‘worldliness’, but it’s connected: ‘gay men,’ she mock-complains, ‘have always seemed to monopolise the wit-and-sophistication ...”

“... One of the aims of anthropology,’ Richard Rudgley says, ‘is to understand the self by way of the other.’ Are we to take it that if the Koryaks of Siberia had a high old time on the fly-agaric – or on the recycled urine of a fly-agaric consumer – we too should stock up on magic mushrooms? Rudgley maintains that humans have ‘a universal need for liberation from the restrictions of mundane existence, satisfied by experiencing altered states of consciousness ...”

“... archly mannered and drably utilitarian in equal measure, laced with a kind of camp whimsy and self-conscious jocoseness. The satiric anatomy, for Hamilton if not for his latest biographer, was thoroughly political in intent. He encountered Marxism in the early Thirties, knocked around with Claud Cockburn, and discovered in Stalin the benevolent daddy he ...”

“... with the oppressor.’ Mrs Ellis, like almost all missionaries in English fiction, is self-deluded and repressed. She sets her captive to work in a steam laundry for repentant prostitutes. But Lily, whose wants are really very simple – a protector, a baby, a business of her own – is resilient. She goes with, instead of against, the spirit of ...”

“... now the ‘Oxford novel’ had seemed to be more or less done for, killed off by a mixture of self-satisfaction and cynicism – but is not conducive to puncturing its absurdities. The behaviour of the English on their home territory is, perhaps, so enthrallingly peculiar that it stifles Chaudhuri’s laughter and leaves him with little to do but watch ...”

“... they be immaculate. Jeffrey Eugenides writes well; his fervent, richly-textured prose is funny, self-mocking, yet desperately serious and sad. Though we know the fate of the girls from the beginning, the novel never loses its tension, its air of expectancy; we keep hoping for one bit of information which will explain the suicides, which will comfort the ...”

“... and the 30th parallel’, whose inhabitants are both fiercely nationalistic and ‘abandoned, self-doubting’. The first half of the book is set in Efica, the second in the much more powerful country of Voorstand. These nations have been imagined in some detail: all the dates in the novel are given according to the Efican calendar (making it hard to tell ...”

“... and not one made by Charles Higham, whose moral fervour in telling this wretched story twangs with self-righteousness. There’s talk of ‘moral cesspools’ and ‘man-hungry, tweedy heiresses’ – it’s a world where God and Charles Higham sit in judgment and everybody gets their just deserts. You might think that a man whose lovers include Katharine ...”

“... and at the same time ‘at the disposal of life’. In this sense Alice seems gloriously self-satisfied. Indeed, emerging as she does at unexpected moments she seems virtually self-created. Surrounded by low-keyed temperaments, she brilliantly dominates the whole book, but that, surely, was what the author ...”

“... by force’. Such use of force Amos Oz considers immoral and in some measure insane. A war of self-defence when life, family and home are under immediate threat is neither. But the line between the two, the ‘degree of evil’ to be tolerated, is one that each individual must distinguish for himself. From the new book come some guidelines: ‘This ...”

“... women enlisting in the army or navy, sometimes out of a patriotic desire for excitement and self-assertion, sometimes in the hope of staying close to a husband or lover, sometimes simply because military or naval service offered a better living than was available in most women’s occupations. It might, for one thing, make it easier to get to the East ...”

“... of guerrillas, a large convoy got through, prices tumbled and the city returned to its cocky self – that of a place which still functions despite 11 years of civil war and thousands of deaths. Kabul has been written off many times. Many of its inhabitants had heard and even believed Western press and intelligence reports of its imminent fall as the ...”

“... quasi-allegorical) symbolism. In Lear, for example, ‘like Paulina, Edgar rouses indignation as a self-appointed spiritual midwife who protracts torture for the good of the tortured.’ But Edgar and Gloucester are not motivated characters in a novel. Edgar is not self-appointed to teach his father to suck eggs, but ...”

“... modest account’ of her acting career, whereas the new work presents a more thoughtful self-portrait of Bloom, the female.Perhaps so, but we may be forgiven some doubt as to whether the fascination of Bloom’s ‘full identity as a woman’ is really what has got her book analysed in newspaper columns, crowed over at cocktail parties and passed ...”