“... of the so-called reinvention of welfare now underway in Washington is to try and stop the apparent self-destruction of the inner-city family. But Bourgois discovers something a little different. Women have children on their own in East Harlem because the men – Primo and Caesar and others like them – are abusive, violent, disruptive and immature. In what is ...”

“... for a long time, perhaps for ever.’ Not long afterwards, I go to see Alexander Batanov, a smart, self-confident man in his thirties who has turned himself from an academic researcher into a political consultant. He has worked with Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, and helped engineer a public reconciliation between this wily former bureaucrat turned Mayor ...”

“... another voyeur? It was difficult not to see the bombing as retribution for the extraordinary self-promotion that brought the Olympics to Atlanta and, to the consternation even of American journalists, dominated the competition. In violation of Olympic protocol, only the US National Anthem was sung to open the games. Only Americans – Dennis Mitchell ...”

“... that were collective. If Gyp’s admiration for Bonaparte and Boulanger was a consequence of self-hatred and a quest for masculinity, how do we explain that same admiration on the part of millions of other male and female Bonapartists and Boulangists? In fact it was common for Legitimists to gravitate to Bonapartism. Many upper-class conservatives were ...”

“... fertility; others were used to mark senility (when pendulous), otherness (when circumcised) and self-control. They were a symbol as much for women as for men and figured in a number of women-only festivals in the form of phallic costumes and phallic cakes. Some care was taken to distinguish different kinds of penis in art, and a strong contrast seems always ...”

“... J.G. Farrell’s trilogy. Burgess’s later Enderby Trilogy, by contrast, already shows too much self-indulgence, and his fatal tendency to achieve an impression of newness by means of gimmickry. Enderby is a portrait of the artist, with his own brand of self-indulgence concealed as satire. Burgess’s admiration for Joyce ...”

“... it must be admitted, like a card-carrying Fascist, but she did sound like a person of overweening self-confidence and historical naivety. ‘Individual Jews, albeit in quite large numbers, collaborated with Bolshevism. Clearly, the numbers on both sides were great enough for each to think the other primarily responsible for genocide. Since it is the least ...”

“... difference between the Cook Islands and French Polynesia is political. The Cook Islands achieved self-government from New Zealand in 1965. After the oppressiveness of Tahiti, Rarotonga was like a breath of fresh air. It was gorgeous, too: extinct volcanic spires, their tips lost in drifting mists and clouds; jungle-clad slopes ending in white sandy ...”

“... of this century to be survivors of the Ekaterinburg massacre: a parade of deluded people drunk on self-aggrandisement, shrieking for attention. Massie throws them up into the air like so many clay pigeons, watches the arc of their flight, and shoots them to pieces just as they near the earth. The story of Anna Anderson, the most plausible of the ...”

“... it was me living my life’ do net enlighten one much. And her soul-searching can look like self-indulgent meandering. ‘Reaching deep into the opaque blue water of memory, I wanted to find a shape beneath, something of the vast mass underpinning that depression,’ she writes, as a prelude to her recollections of what she herself at one stage ...”

“... on society, this has obvious limitations: the rhetoric of ‘escapism’, ‘illegality’ and ‘self-harm’ is powerless to explain the rich and diverse culture which has rapidly developed around the drug. At the centre of this culture is music. The evolution of House and Techno, synthetic descendants of Seventies disco and European electronic pop, has ...”

“... Self-respecting guys don’t read Westerns. In fact, unless you look carefully, no one seems to read them. The cowboy novel rates lower even than pornography in the scale of cultural visibility. W.H. Smith (true to their origins: they won a monopoly at railway stations in 1848 in return for an undertaking to purify the nation’s reading matter) recently banished their modest selection of top-shelf skin magazines ...”

“... failure to distinguish between invention and report, made all the more confusing by the author’s self-indulgent taste for digression. One’s attention is abruptly diverted from the life of Pilate to whatever takes her fancy – what medieval dramatists made of it, or what Bulgakov had to say. Since nothing whatever is known of Pilate’s early ...”

“... noticed. Most commercial men, and most gentry, engaged only very intermittently with this arcane, self-referential Parliamentary world; they had more important things to do. Hoppen himself engages even less with popular politics. Chartism’s transitory appeal faded before the walls of capitalism had been breached. Thereafter, radicalism gets short shrift, as ...”

“... of the previous war and an undoubted patriot, should have withdrawn into depression, defeatism and self-pitying uselessness as soon as the war started was curious, but Danchev withholds judgment. Others may not feel so well disposed. A chill wind blew over Liddell Hart’s reputation again just after the war, when he had recovered his spirits and, through the ...”