“... to the antiquities is a tiny figure sitting alarmingly high up on the temple’s architrave: a self-portrait by the artist, William Pars, the designated draughtsman on the Ionian Expedition of 1764-66. In reality Pars was paying as much attention to the charm of the courtyard scene as he was to the antiquities, though not in a way that pleased everyone: as ...”

“... it’s this growing unease that lends They some narrative continuity despite each section being self-contained, with its own title and its own set of ‘characters’ (a word I put in quotation marks because the protagonists aren’t described or developed and remain little more than names). Only the narrator recurs and even he/she may be a different person ...”

“... madly bad for even the gullible to follow. Taystee and the others turn against her with all the self-serving venom they applied in her service. All the other groups – the Latinas, the lesbians, the poor white trash (just the one tiny grumpy Asian lady) – have their dramas and morality tales, but only the African Americans are shown to be arrogant ...”

“... sometimes on a quasi-ethnographic mission to encounter the other as a means to decentre the self à la Michel Leiris. In 1939 the Swiss-born photographer Eva Sulzer sailed along the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska, where she documented the old longhouses and totem poles of Indigenous peoples; in 1960 the African American artist Ted Joans departed ...”

“... has never looked so good as here, set beside the Moroccan scenes. Translating the theme of the self and of the wilds that surround it to muted northern skies, the painter’s empathy expands. How touchingly makeshift, the low knoll in the bleak Thracian wastes that has become the poet’s sole preserve. How humane, the barbarian who has come to bring him ...”

“... voted against both the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, and exhibited a no-nonsense clarity and self-possession in the Clinton impeachment.The ex-FBI director James Comey evidently shares Nadler’s reservations about the fast work by the attorney general, and is bewildered by Mueller’s non-decision on obstruction. During ‘An Evening with James ...”

“... that has limited European Union member states’ fiscal freedoms since 1999, to Gordon Brown’s self-imposed ‘Golden Rule’, which stipulated public borrowing limits. Business investors can cope with various models of capitalism, involving a wide range of tax rates, corporate governance systems and regulatory frameworks. What they can’t cope with is ...”

“... not only people he liked, but people he wanted to be liked by, and the overall picture is of a self-serving elite that flattered Epstein with their presence and enabled him with their shrugs. According to New York magazine, Epstein taught Prince Andrew ‘how to relax’. To be fair, ‘Andy’, as Epstein calls him, has never appeared to have too much ...”

“... make me different? Did I feel different? . . . I swung back and forth be­tween rejection, doubt, self-hatred and pride in being different from the others . . . I had no place at all in the world! Neither in German society, nor in Cameroon . . . I had no house, no home, I was a nobody in the family and country where I lived. These words​ , reminiscent of ...”

“... editions. As applied in the field it was problematic. In India, the Hindu practice of sati, the self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ pyres, was appalling to the British, but there was resistance to interference with religious practices. Müller, like some Hindus, argued that sati wasn’t a true religious obligation, so might be censured. After ...”

“... Panic (fuelled by greed), injustice, bureaucratic harshness, maddening absurdity, alienation and self-estrangement – all this, but not, in the end, mass murder based on an official racial ideology. The lynching of the farmer in Bad Day at Black Rock was not repeated on a national scale. Otsuka is at her best when such considerations don’t weigh on the ...”

“... meant frustratingly brief contact with Iraqi civilians. The Pentagon made little secret of its self-serving motives for inviting us to take part in the biggest deployment of journalists alongside soldiers since World War Two. There was no reason for the generals to expect journalists to glorify the war (although some officers did seem to envisage ...”

“... To be sure, Adams’s view was just as partisan (perhaps more so), and Franklin had a natural self-confidence guaranteed to drive a nervous man like Adams crazy. But Adams played more than a nuisance role: it was the effective combination of their contrasting temperaments that gave the final treaty its successful shape. Even this caveat makes Morgan’s ...”

“... but the water is just shining in her eye.’ Because he does not pity himself – the absence of self-pity is one of the novel’s many strengths – it doesn’t cross his mind that one of Amy’s, or a reader’s, reactions to his story might be pity: along with anxiety, despair, disgust, excitement (harder to admit to), fear, horror, outrage, shame. Agu ...”