“... of the quintessential Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (a book that was itself accused of a self-directed anti-semitism). To be anti-Hollywood has also, at various times, been a way to enlist the rhetoric of anti-semitism to express sentiments that are anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-New Deal, anti-internationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-Communist or ...”

“... novels, is ultimately immutable, and Flanagan’s heroes reserve their bitterest scorn for the self-interested purveyors of the ‘necessary, sustaining lie’. Flanagan’s latest novel is a work of a different order of ambition, and its approach is at once more playful and more pessimistic. The narrative is circular, but this time its significance is ...”

“... the virtual world out, just as I have done for much of my real life. Though, of course, my fantasy self couldn’t actually read my unreal book because an avatar doesn’t read or do anything, being entirely dependent on the will and brainpower of a real self out here in First Life directing it. I had hopes of there being ...”

“... Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its ...”

“... to a groundless hatred of one’s fellow human beings, and to a profoundly damaging mode of self-hatred. In short, disgust-based law underwrites a disgust with humanity as such. Nussbaum’s analysis of shame is more nuanced; she sees in its cognitive content a potentially affirmative moral and political role. Her account here relies more on ...”

“... have been removed from circulation. It is not news that all images are subject to both direct and self-imposed political and ideological control. Private Jessica Lynch, who had the independence of mind to resent the falsifications of her captivity narrative for propaganda purposes and the courage to say so, has also quietly disappeared from major-media ...”

“... to call Eyre and his officers to account. The imperatives of empire were too potent to admit the self-examination which a prosecution would have involved and the self-doubt which a conviction would have entailed. What the controversy nevertheless exposed and articulated was the deep discomfort among both supporters and ...”

“... But do all the same tell me.’ Ritchie’s diary on the other hand, where he mopes and frets in self-dislike, is, as he admits, the chronicle of ‘an obsessive cycle of boredom, dissipation, remorse, apprehension, boredom again’ in which his centre of emotional gravity rolls around from Sylvia to Elizabeth and back to himself. Urbane, cultivated and ...”

“... in support the poem Maxims I, with its advice (putting it in 20th-century terms) to encourage the self-esteem of the young. Rich, stable, liberal and progressive: why did they lose to a bunch of pirates? The phenomenon certainly seems to demand an explanation, though there may be more than one. Wood starts with a broad perspective and narrows down steadily to ...”

“... Fordlandia staggered on, but it never really recovered. The notion of making the cafeteria self-service was unremarkable and led to such destruction only because the workers were already disaffected. Any excuse would have done. The nature of their unhappiness tells us a great deal about Henry Ford as well as about the sort of workforce he was dealing ...”

“... title might as well as have been a message from Washington via Hollywood to Tehran.Why would a self-professed liberal like Ben Affleck – who majored in Middle East studies – show such insensitivity? The main reason, many scholars would argue, is Orientalism. When Edward Said elaborated his critique of Western scholarship about the ‘East’ in ...”

“... sustained Catholic counter-position, something supple and sophisticated, that was not simply about self-serving efforts by desperate men who would do or write anything to denounce Elizabeth or the mob of heretics (Cecil chief among them) she had appointed to advise her. Lake sees ‘political thought’ not so much as a canon of texts admired for their ...”

“... they were just trying to make it good. There’s plainly a large investment of the writer’s self in these eloquent inhabitings. It’s accompanied by a sympathetic awareness of the subjects’ flaws. We’re left in little doubt about the revenge-of-the-nerds reasoning behind Braben and Bell’s other lives as student Thatcherites, just as Spufford’s ...”

“... that the absence of this concept from the language indicates a deficiency in the awareness of self. Chinese also lacks a word for ‘solitude’ as distinct from ‘loneliness’, as if there were no positive aspect to being separate from the group. At that festival in Berlin, Danlin felt mortified by the quality of the Chinese hors d’oeuvres being ...”

“... is bright with lipstick and amused. Her gestures are as large as fireworks. She puts her whole self into the process of speaking, moving her hands as if she’s flinging handfuls of certainty away from her body. Charcoal cashmere and a slender chain; her hair the correct camel of a good coat. In a scene where she reads her own writing, she looks happy, and ...”