“... currencies are under discussion. The identity of nations is being constructed in acts of symbolic self-affirmation which are also gestures of puzzled self-discovery. The future shape of political structures in the Baltics is coloured by the ease with which independence was won. In Lithuania independence has proved the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1964/70 Labour Government. It is impossible not to wonder whether, had Brown been marginally more self-controlled, he could have persuaded Wilson to devalue in 1965 or 1966. Had he done so, the history of the 1964 Government would almost certainly have been very different. Instead of being a failure by its own self imposed ...”

“... of Jung’s responses was ‘ruefulness-faithfulness’, which Kerr rather boldly claims has a ‘self-evident’ meaning: vis-à-vis Spielrein, Jung was regretting his fidelity to his wife. When Jung and Freud first met, on 3 March 1907, there appears to have been no mention of the Russian girl. Each was impressed by the other, with minor reservations. On ...”

“... a ‘panicky bullying of the boat’ – which confronts each crew member with his or her truest self. Sea voyages, of course, are apt and ancient metaphors for life and for the eternal questing of artists, and the most venerable of these is invoked on the second page: An uncertain passage in the Odyssey has Tiresias speaking of a land without ...”

“... the pioneering (and sometimes strangely stumbling) attempts at analysis by such early masters of self-consciousness as Plato and Aristotle. What was a word? How could meaning reside in a sound? Why are some sequences of words better than others, and how many dimensions of comparison are there? Some utterances are false but beautiful, others are true but ugly ...”

“... genius confined him to what Henry James called the madness of art, since that is exclusive, self-inflicted, entirely wilful and implicit with the grandiosity of the child laying claim to his domain. Francine du Plessix Gray, in this wildly partisan and thoroughly enjoyable biography of Colet, whom she attempts to reinstate as a female icon and ‘yet ...”

“... combines an evocative and clear-sighted account of growing up in small-town New Zealand with a self-conscious sub-plot which offers an explanation of how she was to become a psychiatric patient and a writer. She grew up in a poor but close-knit railway family, her overworked Christadelphian mother planting the first seeds of her imaginative life. Childhood ...”

“... doubly austere. Yet Valentin and Molina’s own story is quintessentially romantic. Molina’s self-sacrifice in the revolutionary cause is a kind of Liebestod. It has to happen, since there can be no future for him after he has parted from Valentin. He has been vouchsafed a glimpse of heaven and cannot be allowed to live. In this respect, Kiss of the ...”

“... the shacks and tents of Ein-Husub’ near the Jordanian border. Tlallim is a desert tramp, a self-styled (Russian Jewish) nomad who lives out of the back of a beat-up jeep. He immediately divines what Yonatan is up to, guessing every detail of his plan to steal across the border by night into Jordan and visit the ruined city of Petra. And he sees the ...”

“... was the cult animal of these islands. In other words, Redgrove’s poem is not only inaccurate but self-defeating. That one mechanically-adduced detail destroys the point of what he was trying to do, which was to send up one of our tribal totems. It’s an irony worth exploring that two poets so opposed to a mechanistic outlook as Hughes and Redgrove should ...”

“... play tricks on scientists, especially when they are given such a golden opportunity either for self-glorification or for the glorification of their God. Anonymity, in this context, is no guarantee against a tendency on the part of informants to swank about their supposed religious experiences: God presumably knows the identity of each informant even if ...”