“... seen the light.’ He also owns another house not quite so splendid but very lucrative. Another self, an alter ego, the billionaire that he might have become had he stayed in ‘monstrous’ New York, begins to emerge as he negotiates the contracts on his property development project. The house on the jolly corner he leaves empty of furniture, but filled ...”

“... deception is fundamental to animal communication; and presumably the best deception is based on self-deception since it precludes involuntary tell-tale signs that might give the deceiver away. Yet to deceive oneself necessarily presupposes that one part of the mind is inaccessible to another. It could accordingly be evolutionarily advantageous that certain ...”

“... of academics, was well aware that the muse can be overpowered and seduced. In his Memoirs and self-adulatory campaign narratives, Montgomery enhanced his own undeniably great achievements by denigrating Auchinleck’s generalship and by exaggerating the poor condition of the Eighth Army when he assumed command in August 1942. Montgomery’s version of the ...”

“... it’s inextricably linked with Oskar’s human failings. His goodness seems inseparable from his self-indulgence, his appetites for cognac and women, his skill at black-marketeering, his talent for not merely cultivating but actually enjoying the company of the murderous Plaszow camp commandant – ‘drinking with the devil’: ‘He’s always been a man ...”

“... and plants, and what seems like the entire lexicon of Chinese medicine. There is an odour of self-congratulation in the dictionary’s emphasis on science, and certain Chinese inventions, such as the seismograph, are written up at some length. Older Chinese dictionaries illustrated usage with tags such as ‘the filial son grows from the end of the ...”

“... is not unaffected by that of Konrad, hero of a poem by Mickiewicz. Between the remembered self and the writing self there were peculiar and painful tensions. A chivalric code coexisted with a deep Victorian pessimism; the emotional extravagance of the letters with the minute and painful labour of the novels; the ...”

“... but also because occupation is bad for Israel, for the values of Zionism as a movement of national self-determination and for the social structure of Israel. Occupation has already brutalised Israel, and its prolongation will brutalise it further. So my unease is not with the political implications of the book, with which I generally agree. My unease is with ...”

“... viewed over a period of some three hundred years. There are 12 sections, each one working as a self-contained short story while also forming part of a larger narrative which is constantly looking back upon and adding to itself. These stories are meaty, dramatic, suspenseful: they deal in issues of betrayal, secrecy, discovery and deception, two ...”

“... The consequence has been to give the whip hand and between 60 and 70 per cent of Bosnia to the self styled ‘Republika Serbska’. Decent, right-thinking, liberal Western states are left with very little idea about what to do with the mess they have acquiesced in creating. It is rather galling for the Bosnians that the UN has used them as a field ...”

“... skills, patriotism and capacity for hard work against his tolerance of corruption and his self-centred, erratic style. Anyone trying to form a judgment about his years in power must also confront his disdain for educated people, his impatience with advice, his craving for approval, his fondness for revenge, his cynicism and his flamboyance. The life ...”

“... then there seems to be no compelling reason for the experienced data-flow to have any kind of self-consistency. Why should those particular data flow at that particular place and time? Ferris himself states, only a few lines away from the previous quote: ‘I assume that there are things out there.’ That is the statement of a (non-naive) realist. How ...”

“... this ‘dire situation’ to come about. By turning its back on evolutionary debate, engaging in a self-absorbed analysis of ‘cultures’ which hovers pleasantly above the gene-bound battlefield, anthropology has allowed sociobiology to triumph. ‘The wider public has turned, for lack of an alternative, to ... people who (to exaggerate only slightly) know ...”

“... abject misery. But Cage’s Ben Sanderson is beyond agony or remorse, if not quite the concomitant self-pity. He wants out of life and not to bore anyone on the way. Weaving down the path to his doom with an unsteady sway of the hips, Cage reveals the charm of his character through his politeness to a prostitute, Sera (Elisabeth Shue), whom he accidentally ...”

“... have told how, even now, survivors of the Far Eastern war have been paying thousands of pounds to self-publishing firms to bring out their fifty-year-old diaries or memoirs. For decades such accounts – some, supposedly, written at the urging of psychiatrists – have been turning up on publishers’ ‘slush piles’; scores more must have been despairingly ...”

“... world stage, has disintegrated, Scots Toryism been demolished by its English counterpart and the self-consciously Scotch or kailyard school of literature regained the ascendancy. In England, or at least in the metropolis, John Buchan evokes that primordial English resentment that is the reward of all ambitious North Britons. For our family, his life is the ...”