“... 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 ...”

“... forces of the Ministry of the Interior, in particular, thereby accelerating the creation of local self-defence organisations. The general picture is one of linked militias and armed groups, operating in what is aptly described as the ‘ghost politics’ of the new Iraq. The shadow state has effectively been revived, but in a devolved ...”

“... were as defiantly countercultural as hippies and peaceniks. Together, white Southern Democrats and self-confessed conservatives shaped the social agenda of conservative Republicanism. The aggressive certainties of Republican foreign policy originate in a further defection from the Democrats. In the 1970s it was followers of the Democrat senator Henry ...”

“... as a counter-charm. The pattern of the major announcement, the dilatory follow-up and the tardy self-defence has shown an alarming consistency in his administration. Obama ordered the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay as the first act of his presidency. Eight months later, Guantánamo remains open and unsolved, the date of its closing has been ...”