“... the Palestinians are struggling to consolidate a genuinely representative Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority and to handle the huge economic and political challenges resulting from Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, while the Sharon government finishes cantonising the West Bank, and Gaza remains walled off. Unable to achieve even the ...”

“... to a story at the opposite pole of experience. Louise and Mattachich – rich, greedy, stupid, self-absorbed and casually anti-semitic as they turn out to be – are an inspired counterpoint to Jacobson’s own history: his grandfather, a rabbi in Lithuania; his parents, immigrants to South Africa in the 1920s; his upbringing in past-its-best ...”

“... in the centre of my body,’ ‘the idea had started to grow blunt, worn down by its own regular self-contemplation.’ Now that Zoe’s son is nine, the astonishing primal connection has sunk out of sight. In place of it, the two build carefully, out of their mutually considerate talk (George is a very nice boy), civilised relations. Simpson understands ...”

“... night Harriet comes back from the dead Guy goes off to give his Egyptian students a lecture on self-determination. Why do we remain interested in this well-meaning insufferable prig and the girl who is soft enough to put up with him? Why do we remain fascinated by their ambience – the inessential auxiliaries of a semi-colonial regime? At the beginning of ...”

“... 1823 in the same carriage as Mary Shelley and observing her as she checked her small son Percy’s self-willed behaviour. She was pleased enough to report the compliment to Leigh and Marianne Hunt in a letter; and if she seems a little arch in liking compliments, she strikes the reader too as deserving them. This is the letter of an unusually intrepid and ...”

“... there was no destiny, merely fate. For Yeats, authority was not exclusively a matter of self-discipline: it also implied the subjugation of others to precisely those forces which the self had, in achieving freedom, overcome. Or, on the other hand, there were those who surrendered their freedom, the possibility of ...”

“... Central European, but surely Viennese – an amiable flibbertigibbet, equally futile and self-regarding; and the portraits are all the more effective for the unresentful forbearance which Ruth contriyes to exert. The period Fifties to Seventies, I suppose; the setting Chelsea and Paris; the atmosphere and detail extremely authentic; we never find ...”

“... Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he went from poverty to Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling book excoriating poor white people for being lazy and not as ...”

“... Aires. She is wearing a soaking wet dress and a pair of fluffy slippers. She tells us with some self-deprecation that her job is taking rich foreigners to see private art collections. On this occasion, she had been sheltering from the rain waiting for her clients when a car ‘came past hugging the kerb and drenched me and my pristine yellow dress’. The ...”

“... into the fire as a baby at the urging of an apparition. But the Beldam turns out to be heroically self-sacrificing. Her unflagging sense of humour is heroic too: she stares down the courthouse as she’s sentenced ‘with a look that says, this entertains me too’.Blakemore’s claim that the past is a realm of ethical ‘foregone conclusions’ is obviously ...”

“... New Labour cabinet members with a constituency in Wales, was prominent, Wales opted for partial self-government. Six years earlier, Blair had been sent to help campaign in the Neath by-election, which Hain would win. In need of somewhere to stay, Blair accepted an offer from the Cardiff West MP, Rhodri Morgan, whose home was variously described as ...”

“... persons at the expense of the community. Neither does the sense of justice proceed wholly from self-interest, though self-interest plays a leading part in its formation. The position is that because of his physical weakness a man can survive and prosper only as a member of a group, and that the scarcity of goods which ...”

“... of a Bildungsroman, with her experience offering Felicitas first an approach to God and then to self-discovery: but it’s experience subject to such strange emphases, and so distorted for purely satirical purposes, that Felicitas’s naivety is seen to be not hers so much as a necessary structural device, as in a latterday Candide. Father Cyprian, with his ...”

“... like Chukwuemeka Ike’s Toads for Supper: it belongs to another genre of Nigerian fiction – the self-confidently didactic style of S. L. Aluko, the engineer who wrote One Man, One Wife and One Man, One Matchet, informing the outside world about Nigeria and telling Nigerians how to behave: two burdens, perhaps, a double yoke. Like Aluko (or Henry ...”

“... them are crude. Hammett’s ‘stark realism’ and ‘plausibility’ are repeatedly invoked as self-evident indicators of merit; it’s ‘imaginative’ but ‘misguided’ to interpret Red Harvest as a Marxist parable because the union leader in that novel is ‘a hollow idealist whose arguments are unpersuasive’ and because ‘there are no masses of ...”