“... 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 ...”

“... again, then. Here we go. The severe outlines of Kennedy’s writing, together with its relentless self-concern, hardly seem calculated to make an immediate appeal. She does not offer the pleasures or complexities of lyrical language, and her sharp, spare sentences can suggest an alienating aggression towards both characters and readers. What might be still ...”

“... its own state. Compared to other subordinated nations, Québec already possesses large powers of self-determination, as well as great influence within the Canadian federation. First, it has been conceded by the ROC that if Québec declares unequivocally for independence it will be allowed to leave: no one can conceive of a US-style civil war, and many in the ...”

“... power that the cries of small babies have to distress. From time to time we have all had to use self-control when faced with the rage other people can create in us. But such feelings, even when acted on, are still feelings, and connect us with others. Murder is usually a social crime. Jeffrey Dahmer is extraordinary (although not alone: Nilsen’s affect ...”

“... light, and she was flustered and breathing hard.’ The dancer aims to impress, but she is also self-deluded. The poet is not. ‘When she came upstairs she sat at this table and tried to write poetry. It came very hard. When she was small, words had flown out of her like birds; now they fell back into her like stones. Their hardness seemed to lacerate ...”

“... much of a look in; it is the texts that he deploys, most elegantly, to illustrate the discourse of self-indulgence. Even then there are questions of typicality. Were the Athenians really obsessed with fish? We think so, because so much of this literature survives only in quotation, and in quotation by the great philologist of food, Athenaios. At his fantasy ...”