“... of a male hierarchy, spends the novel lamenting his lot as the perennial victim of women who are self-centred, bossy, exploitative and vengeful. Amis’s subject is not man’s objective hold on power in our times, but his morale; tougher-minded women readers are going to feel gratified rather than insulted by Stanley’s witness, because he is delightfully ...”

“... notion of ‘capital in general’, or his speculative belief that history was a vehicle for the self-realisation of humanity. The latter notion was derived from Hegel. Like Hegel, Marx offered a logically incoherent view of history, a half-way house between a fully religious theory and a fully secularised theory. For both, history was the embodiment of ...”

“... Stoker himself would have learned of the bizarre practice of which Count Dracula’s sanguinary self-medication is a grand guignol variant – the systematic consumption of human tissue for therapeutic purposes. ‘The old physicians,’ Van Helsing’s colleague Dr Seward tells us darkly, ‘took account of things which their followers do not accept, and ...”

“... unproblematic also makes one wonder how much these strikes contribute to America’s collective self-defence. Elaborating on these doubts, Mazzetti adds that ‘American missions were often based on shards of intelligence from unreliable sources,’ especially ‘unreliable foreign intelligence services’ who routinely approach their American counterparts ...”

“... cycle through easily available pleasures, feeling a combination of frustration, anger and self-disgust, aware that something is missing but unsure exactly what it is.’The utter desolation of this cycling was seen again recently, when West – the man who righteously derailed a charity telethon after Hurricane Katrina with his outburst about how ...”

“... the issue of the paranormal is vulnerable, both to accusations of crankiness and to a sort of self-disgust about the sensationalism involved; and it is hard to sift out an acceptable truth, given the human tendency to confabulate, the fallibility of memory, the wide scope for interpretation, and the prejudice which invests the whole subject. As a good ...”

“... of the UN unfold in practice: commitment to the rule of international law and the right of self-determination; also to the right of large numbers of people – above all, to the UN’s way of thinking, people in Africa – to place marked and folded papers in sealed boxes. The UN announced the creation of a mission to the territory (Minurso) and began ...”

“... any form of writing does. For thousands of years we have used writing to extend the reach of the self through seals, spells, inscriptions, letters, books and pamphlets. In the case of bots modelled on real individuals, might they not wield some diluted form of that individual’s authority? Letters and contracts already perform this function, while the ...”

“... the Palestine part of the agreement would be much more than cosmetic. There was going to be no self-determination for the Palestinians. Once again, the Israelis had succeeded in bending the Americans to their will. Peace between Israel and Egypt would have been universally welcomed, had it been linked to the achievement of a comprehensive settlement. But ...”

“... was he demasculated? He looks pretty tough from the word go (even Norden describes him as ‘a self-assured, goal-orientated fellow’). The dismal equation of disability with an internal defectiveness is so thorough that it seems to have bewitched him into overlooking a rare exception, where the character who is physically impaired is the one to embody ...”

“... Each has a different experience of colonialism, a different narrative of independence, a different self-image; accordingly, the epidemic has been viewed differently, tackled differently. Her well-organised book is practical, concrete and full of hard information, but it lacks nothing in subtlety; she is conscious of the ambivalence and complexity that hedge ...”

“... a particularly fraught occasion he proposed to her. He’s always felt that she betrayed her best self by settling instead for a cosseted life as Mrs Richard Dalloway. It is Peter who has held her feet most relentlessly to the fire, and now he’s back in London after three decades as a colonial administrator in India, mannerisms intact – notably the habit ...”

“... blame it on the EU, and begin storytelling. Abstract principles such as the right to cultural self-determination for minority peoples are there to lend lustre to your defence of your own people, not to help you identify the complaints of your people with the complaints of others, because that’s what they are: others. The Brexiteers’ opponents, the ...”

“... model Enid Firminger; passages with Nina Hamnett and Dorothy Varda, another model, both of them self-destructive; a fling with the artist Juliet O’Rourke, wife of a modernist architect; a tumble in the afternoon with the Irish writer Mary Manning; a ‘great passion’ for Marion Coates, wife of another architect, before his wedding to Violet ...”

“... fine detail of the everyday, delighting in twisting clichés against themselves, clinical, witty, self-deprecating, judging. The voice was there; the characters, I thought, were obliged to dress themselves in it, each one a different hero. Rab Hines, the working man with the young family, in The Busconductor Hines (1984); Tammas, the young gambler of A ...”