“... a victory. This was not just one more Soviet town, a Kharkov or an Orel. But once again we see the self-defeating nature of the Nazi approach to war. At the outset the German army had cost itself the sympathies of millions of Ukrainians by treating them as subhuman; it now fell victim to a huge pincer movement extending west of Stalingrad because of its ...”

“... No wonder corporate and political leaders hire this stylish practice: there is a mirroring of self-images here, at once technocratic and innovative, that suits client and firm alike. ‘Foster’ offers an architecture of great panache, with sleek surfaces, usually of metal and glass, luminous spaces, often open in plan, and suave profiles that can also ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... before him, portrays himself as a representative of these places and their cosmology, an act of self-invention as bold as that of any renamed outlaw. Reagan went from the Midwest to Hollywood; Bush is a product of East Coast privilege, even if he did go to flat, dry Midlands, Texas, to cultivate his insularity and a failed oil business. For more than a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her own. Still, if she did not shower these particular scintillating adjectives on her flapper-self, her life proclaimed them. A flapper in the 1920s, like a post-feminist today, hovers between defiance and compliance. She embraces the subordination the previous generation fled, but calls it ‘brave and gay and beautiful’, not ...”

“... Isbell instead of bailing out, and he crashes. Isbell bails out, and soon recovers. Cassada’s self-sacrifice goes unnoticed: competence is what counts. Now that Isbell is viewed from the outside he is both more flawed – he sounds more mistakenly sure of himself – and more likeable than in The Arm of Flesh: ‘Isbell’s task was biblical. It was the ...”

“... the defender? How come the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories can never be engaged in self-defence, while the Israeli army is always the defender?’ My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified matters for me: ‘If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to make ...”

“... think about it at all. A lot of Sunstein’s recent work has had this quality: scolding us for our self-righteousness and pointing out the human dimensions of various issues that we have failed to take rationally into account. In Worst-Case Scenarios, the scolding tone becomes more unpleasant when Sunstein confronts the critics of the US refusal to ratify the ...”

“... Auxerre is an uncomfortable place for a Greek god. Dionysus is no longer his old bacchanalian self:With all the regular beauty of a pagan god, he has suffered after a manner of which we must suppose pagan gods incapable. It was as if one of those fair, triumphant beings had cast in his lot with the creatures of an age later than his own, people of larger ...”

“... the truth.’ He’s ninety years old and beginning to lose his memory and has scattered notes to self about his daughter all over his apartment, ‘as if sheets of paper were suddenly sprouting from the floor’. Johannes’s daughter is unimpressed. ‘The malevolent and idolatrous passion for the truth … When it is useless. The stubborn frivolity of the ...”

“... three years earlier. Pnina Lahav writes in her new biography that Bluma and her daughters ‘were self-conscious about looking like beggars: unclean, unkempt, and exhausted’. Not long after they arrived in the US, they watched Moshe marching with his fellow trade unionists on Labour Day. Tzipke was terrified by the sight of mounted police: ‘It’s the ...”

“... Turner argues that Chaucer created a type of character new to English literature: one who is self-aware and gives the impression of revealing her thoughts and emotions. There were antecedents. Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of verse letters in the voices of such women as Penelope, Dido and Sappho, provided the basis for Chaucer’s own collection of ...”

“... that populate ordinary thinking about the mind: beliefs, pain, consciousness, free will, the self. He sought to reconcile these aspects of the mind with the scientific story, to show how they can be integrated with such things as neural pathways carrying information, molecules moving according to mechanistic laws, the fundamental particles of atomic ...”