“... organs of propaganda in Iraq. This view is that the royal family in Kuwait has been corrupt and self-serving, and has shamelessly and cynically stratified society within the Amirate. Such criticism has found some sympathy among those inside Kuwait. As one Palestinian living and working there told me, Kuwait is a place of insiders and outsiders. If you are ...”

“... she casts at least provisional doubt on both the soul and the judgment of her voluble and somewhat self-intoxicated narrator, as he assembles the remains of his disintegrating family for us. He has been in the North and knows his Thoreau, so he starts by dismantling one ruined house in order to fortify and then inhabit another. And from this fastness he ...”

“... woman. The contrast with Cleopatra is clear. The story of her death is a story of self-destruction. There is no male hero-murderer. Her snakes in the end turn against her, their host, to show that ultimately the power of woman will destroy itself. This story has, of course, elements of pathos. There is a tragedy, almost a heroism, in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have had a permanent and ... useful part to play’. Freud too saw phobias as having to do with self-protection, but where for James the open space evokes evolutionary memory, for Freud it evokes personal memory, and the anxiety felt in agoraphobia ‘seems to be the ego’s fear of sexual temptation – a fear which, after all, must be connected in its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pontalis uses a style basically resistant to a certain form of inquiry in the construction of a self-portrait that is itself the fruit of that form of inquiry? After all, Pontalis is no innocent in these matters. He is a survivor of Sartre and Lacan, the two most ferocious opponents that psychoanalysis has had to endure: Sartre with his insistence on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of production might destroy or damage the planter’s crop. It took nerve and courage and immense self-confidence (Breen likens it to virtu) to become ‘a lord of the soil’ – that is to say, to get a good price and, equally important, to be respected for the quality of his leaf. Good management signified ‘private virtue’: to criticise a planter’s ...”

“... gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s scepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.’ Exactly. This is something we all learn at our first editor’s knee. So why does it take Ms Malcolm 144 ...”

“... skilful thriller – Le Carré is certainly at the top of the class – and add the elements of self-seeking, cynicism, betrayal and pointlessness with an air of rueful integrity, a suggestion that your respect for the truth makes you write it this way, however distasteful and jarring it may be for the reader. Of course the reader loves it, and the circuit ...”

“... context, ‘you can’t see the join’), and have made their book potentially useful to the self-instructing student and the self-mistrusting teacher by providing a little programme of exercises at the end of each chapter.* Pedagogically, the book is admirable, and will surely enable readers ‘to understand something ...”