“... who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist and self-described ‘mercenary of emergency medicine’, he helped launch Médecins sans frontières in the early 1970s. He broadcast the plight of the Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, advised Mitterrand in the 1980s, roused public indignation over events ...”

“... They thought it all was experience.’ The letters show the moment by moment process of self-enlargement, of fiction taking over from reality, of Hemingway braiding himself a style first and then a history to match it. If his family mistook so much of what he wrote for experience, that’s because he set it up that way, signing himself ‘Old ...”

“... but not when he sticks to his mission, part of which is to persuade his audience that only self-deprecation and a lack of curiosity blind them to the fact that the roofscapes and skylines of Durham and Stralsund are the equals of Venice. Some of his favourite stomping grounds are those ‘places as far south as south of the Thames which feel – and ...”

“... were already moving swiftly to turn his ancestral village into a literary theme park. Among the self-appointed guardians of free speech, it was clear enough that Mo Yan’s prize had sent no message to the Party, except maybe one of affirmation. The outcry that followed the announcement seemed to come from another time, recalling debates over Soviet ...”

“... worldview, and about the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by the outside world’s interest in some ‘damn nasty Rasta’, all ‘ganja smell and frowsy arm’, as an angry mother puts it. Other characters do impressions of foreign music-business types ...”

“... was the war that was Spanish, not the poetic response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and ...”

“... today, a laboriousness directly proportional to the spontaneity of the original event. The self-appointed memorialist has first to describe the scenario, the players and the action before he can actually tell the joke, which after such a build-up is inevitably a damp squib. Ion is quite happy to spend a couple of pages explaining the context for ...”

“... Penelope ‘This family life is not for me. I find it leads to deep depression And I was born for self expression.’* Gouine, as Quinn points out in her note on the poem, is a French slang term for lesbian that gained currency in the 1920s and 1930s. It may have derived from the fashion for dressing up in male evening dress in beau monde lesbian circles ...”

“... billboards and (by 1948) 137 million postage stamps. Since then it has proved useful not only to self-styled patriots but also to satirists, most recently in the New Yorker, whose issue of 28 May featured on its cover Barry Blitt’s redrawing of the Iwo Jima event with the flag at half-mast and one visibly black soldier contributing to the ...”

“... setting that is not, however, despised (any more than it is in Whitman). It shows Walser’s self-aware, occasionally prickly poverty, his rough desire to please in the context of his independence, his extreme civilisation paired with his extreme wildness. All his life, it seems, he had a relish for the human animal, writing with notable, undissembled ...”

“... his influence inside the Beltway in the mid-1950s, after he began exhorting Americans to pursue ‘self-perfection’ and ‘spiritual distinction’ instead of exporting freedom and democracy to the rest of the world. But for the innumerable think-tank experts and ambitious academics and columnists who long to leave a mark on history, Kennan’s telegram ...”

“... everything else Stevenson wrote, has never stopped being subject to the rigours of his readers’ self-defining critiques. Everyone has a view of Stevenson. His father said he was ‘stupid looking’. Edmund Gosse said he was ‘as restless and questing as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry ...”

“... matters considerably, forcing a direct confrontation between the principle of equality and that of self-determination that I do not propose to resolve here. He is wrong to assume that ‘the vast majority of Iraqis want … the equal treatment of all Iraqis regardless of sex, religion and so forth.’ In the latest election, the majority of Iraqis voted for ...”

“... propriety, general vulgarity and callowness, and troubling Tovey the chaste grammarian and self-appointed guardian of the sacred Teutonic flame. (But he doesn’t follow through the consequences of his rueful acknowledgment of Strauss’s overriding compositional energy.) Some passages from this mainly dull material are well worth revival. The composer ...”

“... Jew, and so rhetorically reproduces the schism within Jewish culture and politics between the self-loving and those who are not. Arendt is clearly opposed to a Jewish nationalism founded on secular presumptions. But she doesn’t find a polity based on religious grounds any more acceptable. A just polity will extend equality to all citizens and to all ...”