“... than Mustafa Barzani. It’s the predicament of smaller nations that they must bestow (calculated, self-interested) love on their supposed protectors but rarely see it reciprocated. When things begin to unravel it’s always the weaker side that loses. The year was 1975, and the agreement to which Barzani refers was an accord that the shah of Iran had just ...”

“... 1934, Hitler has been chancellor for a year, and Heidegger is beginning to take stock. There is no self-doubt here: ‘For years I have known myself to be on the right path.’ But there is a nagging sense that the Nazis may not have fully appreciated the importance of his thinking. Stuck in the positivistic biologism of the 19th century, they have not grasped ...”

“... NGOs, local public and private sector institutions and those (not many) who are successfully self-employed, usually merchants. People try to help one another, but charity isn’t the simple, unencumbered act it once was. A friend from a prominent Gaza family described his dilemma: ‘After paying my taxes to Hamas, the new fees that spring up all the ...”

“... the major themes in the fiction of Richard Ford. What engages him is the churning of the conscious self, as changeable as the weather on an iffy day. What kind of a day is such a day? Soft or threatening? What kind of people were Ford’s mother and father, whose inner lives might offer strong clues to the meaning of the author’s own? That question has been ...”

“... would come to know, over the next few months as ‘the fascination’. That sounds melodramatic, self-indulgent, but it was the word that came to mind then and as time went by it seemed more accurate than anything else. Somewhere, at the core of this terrifying paralysis and helplessness, there was a fascination, a taste, not of death, exactly, but of ...”

“... to canonisation, eventually granted by Pope Alexander III in 1161. There was a strong element of self-interest in the process, designed to promote the status of Westminster Abbey, Edward’s foundation and burial place, but there is more to be said about the speed and means by which the Edward of recent history ‘faded into the image of a saint’.The real ...”

“... of the moment by retreating into a monkish solitude, or searching for authenticity in the self-mythologising self-care movement. Emira does both. She longs to work with her hands, as her family does: her dad is a beekeeper, her mum binds books, her little brother is an award-winning barista and her sister is a ...”

“... too stupidly obvious and so on). That adjustment needs to happen in a secret space, with the ego, self-loving or self-hating, tied up safely elsewhere. Trying to write like a Genius, any writer might feel an awful fraud. Howland’s thwarted career is our loss: at her best she is very good. Most of the stories in the first ...”

“... complacently celebrating Poland’s ‘return to Europe’, we should be trying to understand why self-declared anti-liberals succeeded in the first place, and in what ways their politics might endure even if they lose at the polls.In The New Politics of Poland Jarosław Kuisz offers a competent and well-written account of the larger forces at work in PiS’s ...”

“... to represent themselves, albeit within the limits of the categories offered.Back in 1939, however, self-identification was not on the agenda. Instead, the bureau created scenarios – each, Bouk says, ‘amounting almost to a short story’ – for would-be enumerators to disentangle. What was the race of a child born to a white man and a Japanese woman? Or ...”

“... Take this one, from ‘How to Be an Other Woman’, the first story in Moore’s first book, Self-Help (1985), in which Charlene is having an affair with a married man. He rings her while she’s at work: ‘Hi, this is Attila,’ he says in a false deep voice when you pick up your office phone. Giggle. Like an idiot. Say: ‘Oh. Hi, Hun.’ It’s ...”

“... entrepreneur: manically energetic, pushing, perfectionist. He could occasionally be amusingly self-deprecating, or flamboyantly generous to staff, but only within the bounds of an imperious egotism. No one doubted that he was ‘The Chief’. He stimulated competition within his empire in the hope of making a product good enough to destroy all rivals ...”

“... crossings, Phillips travelled almost all the way along the western side of the border, and, as a self-described ‘passionate believer in the individual freedoms that the Eastern Bloc so systematically deprioritised’, his point of view is essentially a Western one. When he crosses over into what was Czechoslovakia and East Germany, for instance, he feels a ...”

“... only pretending to care to make heaps of cash? Mark Halyard is the wrong kind of people. A self-professed ‘extinction industry cunt’, the only animals he appears to care about are dogs: ‘If [they] ever went extinct – that’s totally different.’ The mining company he works for is drilling into the last known habitat of the venomous ...”

“... in confinement as both juvenile and adult, and grew up largely on the San Francisco streets with a self-taught sage called Mo as a teacher, but he can certainly turn a sentence:Mo was always muttering apocalyptic shit from the start, so it wasn’t obvious right away when it started coming more often and at a higher pitch. Especially because the words were the ...”