“... its potential for awfulness. The idea that Mrs Thatcher might think Britain should become self-sufficient in wood is the novel’s only implausible flight of fancy, and it is imaginatively a good one. The image of the British countryside replaced by conifer plantations conveys the banality of Thatcherism and its meanness of spirit, and it lends the ...”

“... the loss of a wife he has belatedly learned to love, looking back over forty years to another self, squaring accounts with the past. His starting-point is the year 1926, in Monaco, where young Edmund is fashionably adrift among the gaming wheels and the champagne. An accident brings him to the notice of Roscoe Hamilton, a big-game hunter who is planning ...”

“... good dust-jacket. The front reproduces Lucian Freud’s Interior with plant, reflection listening (self-portrait), a picture of the painter, ear cupped, looking through the foliage of a spider-grass plant, foreshortened to the size of a huge jungle tree. The back has a photograph of Aldiss, whisky glass in hand, contemplating himself in a baroque full-length ...”

“... arguing Hong Kong’s case and carrying Peking’s pronouncements back. But sometimes a narrower self-interest plays a part. One of the more saddening developments in the last two years has been the cynical manner in which local capitalists have united with the Chinese Communist leaders in opposing the growth of democracy in Hong Kong. For Peking, an ...”

“... the Palestinians, died last year. His book is a moving testament to his humanity and capacity for self-criticism, an old man’s mea culpa on behalf of his country and the movement to which he dedicated his life. Realising in old age that he ‘had always been under the influence of certain myths that had become accepted as historical truth’, he decided to ...”

“... from high romance: the dying hero, and the great undying love of lovers who are at once a single self and complementary parts of a whole. This combination of ideas allows us to feel both a wrongness in Jackson himself and a goodness around him (female – located in this first wife, and then in the baby daughter towards whom love for Jackson is shifted). In ...”

“... to inhabit provided equally sad and delightful anomalies, occasions for compassion, ridicule and self-display. Presumably in reasonably secure conditions, Wilson, ‘wearing flame-coloured pyjamas and carrying a madonna lily’, played Buggery in an Oxford show of the Seven Deadly Sins. In an age when it was dangerous to advertise homosexual inclinations he ...”

“... Ayckbourn testifies that Pinter was an extremely nice guy – but simply an absolute belief in the self sufficiency of the text.’ There’s not much hope for a biography whose subject can’t be brusque or rude, and Billington’s relish for stereotypes doesn’t help us much either. This is a world of bedrocks and watersheds, where people stay the course ...”

“... importance’. It would not be too Chestertonian to observe that it was only when he was being too self-consciously a Catholic writer that Chesterton now seems so parochial; whereas when he was being parochial and subjective he made some of his most universally memorable utterances. We must all have our favourite bits of Chesterton – few writers have had so ...”

“... Congress has been the victim of its own early success. It was seen to have brought India to self-rule. It embodied the new nation, secular, democratic and united, and was its central symbol. It also had support from abroad. The Americans were irritated by Nehru’s insistence that post-Revolutionary China should be allowed into the United Nations and by ...”

“... are going to be in better scholarly focus than others. When she writes, in a not entirely self-explanatory section on ‘the fetish’, that Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon ‘was inspired by fetish objects – the African masks that he first saw on a trip to Spain in 1905’ – the fact that the date, the location and the influence are all wrong ...”

“... the pro-Nazi sympathies evinced by many Afrikaner Nationalists. Having bought into Communism in self-defence against Fascism, many were at first quite discomfited to find that this might entail the acceptance of blacks as equals. Slovo recalls with great humour and fondness this now vanished ghetto world in which for armchair socialists ‘a kaffir remained ...”

“... by analysis of Alfred’s strangely protesting will. Smyth digs further into issues of national self-respect which may still seem painful. The Chronicle line is that Wessex policy was never to pay Danegeld but rather to fight every time. Other kingdoms might knuckle under – Mercia, for example, ruled according to the Chronicle’s scornful 874 entry by ...”

“... It is a sign of the portentous absurdity of so much Post-Modern thought that such glaringly self-evident positions need to be so loudly affirmed. And it is a mark of how much Stuart Hall is in thrall to this theoretical camp that he needs so defiantly to re-emphasise them. The re-emphasis, for all that, is much to be welcomed. Hall, sensibly ...”

“... John Wayne Bobbitt’s girlfriend was acquitted of assault for severing his dick; her grounds were self-defence. John Wayne Gacy was one of many serial killers and mass murderers infatuated with John Wayne. Henry Kissinger is another. ‘I’ve always acted alone,’ he has said. ‘Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy ... entering the ...”