“... readers, meanwhile, having availed themselves of the opportunity to indulge, ever so briefly, in self-loathing, put down their newspapers and themselves move on to other things. Nothing has changed, but columnist and readers alike feel better for the cathartic effect of this oblique, reassuring encounter with an alien world. Today, having dissolved any ...”

“... pipeline that would run from Iran, through Shia-dominated Iraq, to Syria; in November 2005 a self-defence pact was signed which allows Iran to store weapons, sensitive equipment and hazardous material on Syrian soil; Iran’s ambassador in Beirut promised to counter an Israeli attack on Syria with ‘full power’. The links are theological, too. When I ...”

“... A few of my own complaints: Krauss has written beautifully (in Bachelors, 1999) about the self-portrait photography of the Surrealist Claude Cahun; in a book already in danger of scanting women artists active before the 1960s, the omission of Cahun is striking. It is odd, too, given the book’s pervasive interest in the impact of Freudianism on the ...”

“... a momentous revelation. How did people live? I remembered old peasant stories of magic treasure: self-replenishing cooking pots found under rocks in fields, donkeys shitting gold. I felt I understood these tales for the first time: the desperation under the antic humour. The strange thing, though, was that later I felt only satisfaction with the way I had ...”

“... horticultural phase taste like pumpkins, the liqueur they distil in the cellar explodes, their self-medication makes them ill, and so on. And when, later, they move up from more or less scientific experiments to start dabbling in the humanities, developing tastes and ambitions in literature, education, even politics, we can be sure in advance that every ...”

“... in his treatment of Shaw’s sexuality and the influence of Shaw’s lovers, friends, family and self on his work. Shaw claimed that his active sex life began at the age of 29 and ended 14 years later; for Holroyd, the chaos of Shaw’s early affairs, the celibacy of his marriage and the wild romantic agonies of his later attachments (usually to ...”

“... of human emotion, passion, disgust and other affective manifestations of the ‘interior’ self. In Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth Century Art and Fiction, David Trotter, the author of several other books about 19th-century writers, proposes what he calls ‘mess-theory’ (and, as a corollary, ‘litter-theory,’ which he regards as ...”

“... Gandhi?’ ‘No, Kasturbabai Gandhi’, embarrassing all by invoking the Mahatma’s small, self-effacing, long dead wife – was seen in the stands, sitting next to Marshneill Gavaskar, grinning because she could see herself on television. She smiled; and waved – at whom, no one, among the millions watching, knew. During the 35th over, by which time ...”

“... which most often arises in businesslike discussions about where she should go to regain it (self-pity is utterly alien to her, though not entirely to Winston). The reader gets an impression of Clementine’s tendency to indisposition, owing largely to her confinements. But then here is a letter she wrote to Winston in 1913. I had such a lovely hunt ...”

“... seems to play an important role. Instead, it offers a window onto the remarkable battles between self-confident scientific dogmas which raged across Europe at the end of the 19th century – and which continue today. When professional scientists write books about past heroes, they often have a contemporary aim in view. Cercignani is no exception. He is an ...”

“... and ubiquity in the United States of a legal education, in other contexts the mark of cabalistic self interest, becomes a badge of political freedom. The third is a culture of consent. No state can endure unless its people accepts that their representatives speak for them, rather than simply at them. The dilemma of modern democracy, as Siedentop (following ...”

“... almost universally believed that Cicero had died an exemplary death. Whatever accusations of self-interest, vacillation or cowardice they might level at other aspects of his life, everyone reckoned that on this occasion he behaved splendidly: sticking his bare neck out of the litter, he calmly demanded (as heroes have continued to do ever since) that the ...”

“... the miner in ‘The Closing down of Summer’, ‘I must always be careful of sloppiness and self-indulgence lest they cost me dearly in the end.’ This could serve as MacLeod’s own manifesto: a declaration in favour of absolute simplicity, one opposed to the whole idea of ‘literariness’. The paradox is that the spareness of MacLeod’s style is ...”

“... among other things, to be somewhere else’) and goes on to describe Montaigne as putting ‘not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence’. Astonishment, fluidity and changefulness are inherently resistant to precepts which describe how they come about, and these things are Montaigne’s ...”

“... a story and doing good, she would try to do good. It was a strange, provoking, deliberately self-contradictory tale, which instantly sparked heated commentary. It was hard to figure out Coetzee’s meaning. Yet the fictive device had justified itself: one felt that the other participants had been content with their perfected errors while Coetzee, in his ...”