“... face. Breaking this locution out into an upper-case ‘Other’ introduces an opposition between self and Other cherished by literary theorists but alien to the dramatic exigencies of this moment of dialogue. Earlier, speaking of the Transjordanian tribes, Havrelock writes: ‘They pledge obedience to Joshua as long as “Yahweh your God [her italics] is ...”

“... We go out on a tribute to Trotsky: ‘In the rush of confession, revision, repudiation, self-advancement and mere ageing that has overtaken the New York crowd, the idea of the fearless unpublished, unimpressed and uncompromised intelligence has taken rather a beating. That is why, long after Trotskyism has become irrelevant, the admonishing figure ...”

“... police sirens. In Saundersland even a serial child rapist is endowed with a crudely noble set of self-conceptions, if only to be a more worthy foil to his repressed teenage hero and dreamy damsel in distress. The title story is a similarly straight tale of heroism, this time doubled: a near-suicidal man with cancer saves a boy from drowning in a frozen ...”

“... irreparably stained by her old life, she abandons her throne for a convent, and then swoons into a self-willed, shame-ridden death. Just as the princely father noticed a purity of spirit in the girl from the city’s underbelly, we, or at least the media-makers who cater to our guilty interests, saw a brand of charm in Jade. She had the quality which most ...”

“... going to pretend to have read it all – I have a PhD in 19th-century British history, and some self-respect. It is a criminally bad book. But I doubt that my or anyone else’s saying so will make much difference to anything. Trevor-Roper was fascinated and amused by Robert Peters, but also spent a great deal of time and energy informing susceptible ...”

“... Fortysomething Cath, Australian, veteran of the barricades, self-described ‘bedrock feminist’ and ‘unreconstructed left-winger’, works for a down-town investment bank. Her much-loved husband, twenty-five years older, has Alzheimer’s, and for the first time in her life the free-spirit, freelance travel writer understands the need for real money ...”

“... the idealisation of little girls in Victorian culture is an attempt to repossess the remembered self rather than a wish for sexual possession of the other. Though Robson concedes that elements of sexual exploitation are present in all this, she moves away from the assumption that repressed sexuality was a dominant impulse in Victorian culture, and one which ...”

“... outsider. Basara has here defined the most fundamental and powerful of fictional engines – the self-observing observer, riddled by doubt. But he also has a problem, a problem he’s too committed to avoid: his particular amalgam of fictive loners has nothing really to rail against; unlike the others, he is created not by his situation but by authorial ...”

“... 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 ...”