“... of homosexuality in schools, it’s family relations that stand in the way of the sexual self-understanding of young people. What are the odds of someone like Mungo being able to overcome his negative programming if he waits another half-decade? The laws that masquerade as his protectors would rather see him mangled than whole.The Glasgow of Young ...”

“... volumes has been a striking contrast to the earlier edition. Nicolson today seems conventional, self-satisfied and smug, while Channon, for all his misjudgments, ingratiating behaviour and bigotry, is revealing about public and private life, society and sexuality, and honest about himself to a degree that makes these Diaries a weird kind of masterpiece. He ...”

“... English. I’ve thrown in my lot with England. It’s the best country in the world.’ Such loyal self-deprecation is scarcely less suspect. The Crooked Timber of Humanity is more an elegant restatement than a substantial addition to his characteristic themes. Three quarters of the book consists of essays from the same fund of texts out of which the four ...”

“... painful ambivalence, at others with unqualified enthusiasm, but nearly always as the only means of self-determination at their disposal. In The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, published in 1992, Davidson spoke of the ‘spiny contradictions’ beneath the rhetoric of nationalism: ‘If nationalism has been and can be a ...”

“... declares at the beginning of his memoir, has been ‘a rich, multifaceted and unique story’. Self-flattery is characteristically Lanzmannian, but its truth in this case can hardly be denied. He has lived on a grand scale. A teenage fighter in the Resistance, he became Sartre’s protégé in the early 1950s as an editor at Les Temps modernes. He also ...”

“... his wounds and pains,’ Jackson suggests, ‘led him to a place of brittle irony with others, and self-pity with himself.’ The incident further chipped away at the fragile foundations of his parents’ marriage. Estelle, the ‘rebellious dissenter’, wanted to sue the hotel, but Joseph persuaded Chester to sign away his claim, since doing so entitled him ...”

“... presenting tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians as collateral damage, in a war of self-defence forced on the world’s most moral army, as the IDF claims to be?The answers for many people around the world cannot but be tainted by a long-simmering racial bitterness. Palestine, as George Orwell pointed out in 1945, is a ‘colour issue’, and ...”

“... be summarised as follows. Une Saison en Enfer was composed in 1873. The mode is valedictory, and self-punishing, but it is not the final work – Rimbaud continued to compose his Illuminations, which had begun as a handful of prose-poems some time in 1872, either in Charleville or during his first stint in London with Verlaine. Meanwhile, in ‘Mauvais ...”

“... contributions, it should be said, were meagre). One cannot help wondering about the combination of self-restraint and sly wit which led Sir Keith Thomas, chairman of the dictionary’s supervisory committee from inception to completion and one of the most celebrated historians of his generation, to confine himself to a single entry, that on the figure known ...”

“... mental not physical damage. Only many years of psychoanalysis, he believed, had saved him from self-destruction through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s ...”

“... easily findable on YouTube. ‘What we want to look at is the hard edge of a tough, fashionable, self-conscious group, now at the top of the New York avant-garde art world,’ Melvyn Bragg explains, blunt brown sideburns toning nicely with his blunt brown tie. A bit later he addresses Acker directly. ‘You talk in your books about doing away with ...”

“... found no dinner prepared? Besides, she had meant to phone the weekly order at the grocer’s, the Self Help, and it might be too late for the order-boy to deliver it … Our picnic was too soon over.Lottie died not long afterwards. Her self-effacement seems to have served as a caution to her daughter.Frame and Sargeson read ...”

“... of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in all British colonies. His plan got little local support. Few Chinese businessmen saw any need to share even municipal government with rickshaw-pullers. Hong Kong’s British (mostly Scottish) tycoons have never lost their ...”

“... a class by themselves in the history of artificial life: the first solo free-walking self-propelled androids’. The other figures offer variations on the monk’s theme. One is a lay brother worrying a tiny beaded rosary; another a bearded saint crowned by a halo, with a six-note glockenspiel in its rump including miniature bells and ...”

“... have a mind of his own, and a more creative and productive mind than Jonas’s phlegmatic waking self. The night work of the title is what Jonas watches on subsequent tapes, with ever-increasing horror: the figure on the screen laughs, screams like an animal, wields a knife dangerously close to his throat and trots off to the bathroom to pull an infected ...”