“... but given the social conditions I didn’t think I could.’ There is also much pride and lack of self-pity. ‘We haven’t suffered enough,’ one says. ‘We’ve been too close to the USSR. Now we have to learn the hard way.’ This, unfortunately, isn’t going to be a problem. To the north, the Soviet Union displays froideur and has enough troubles of ...”

“... office had to be less than totally ruthless. The Gorbachev years had made the Russian people more self-confident and less afraid. They had also seen the beginning of the media age, with TV cameras and reporters coming and going almost as they pleased. So when Yeltsin looked out of his window in the White House and saw all those post-Soviet people climbing up ...”

“... treating her? Or should we keep her alive as long as possible, respecting the life of her present self such as it is, basking in the sunshine, smiling at anyone who enters her field of vision? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the latter choice would be a serious harm to Margo, or at least to the Margo who executed the document. By not letting her ...”

“... the modern world to the infection of politics by fanaticism, and to talk as though decent doses of self-interested pragmatism, whatever their other shortcomings, at least help to inoculate the polity against this kind of evil. Sri Lanka is a reminder that self-interested pragmatism is not always so benign. Thirty years ...”

“... ask for editorial support. Not much change from the first political Benn, except that he has more self-confidence. At the same time another stream of thought becomes more insistent. Always part fascinated, part repelled by journalism (he continues to this day to claim that he remains a journalist, and he retains his NUJ card), he gave in 1968 two ...”

“... European countries after World War Two. There was a spirit of national unity, uncorroded by either self-interest or group interest. In particular, the corruption which has since become a serious problem in China was largely absent. Poverty, prostitution and drugs were eliminated. At China’s low level of economic development, the Soviet-style central planning ...”

“... with the beautiful faces were also, mysteriously, the ones it was most fun to be with.’ The self-proclaimed ‘honesty’ of the wild, well-born stranger was doubted, but her fascination prevailed. She married an art dealer, Kenelm, understood to be seriously ill, and conducted daring affairs, one of them on the Métro with her friend Monique’s friend ...”

“... respectability arose within the working class as a spontaneous accompaniment of working-class self-assertion. This creates problems for the orthodox explanations of Victorian respectability which historians have not really confronted. Sometimes the unsatisfactoriness of the situation is acknowledged, but no more, with judicious quotation-marks, such as ...”

“... methods, on his memories of the Haitian labourers in Biran; sometimes revealing: he considers him self a self-taught revolutionary, but one who already had a Marxist formation at the time of Moncada. He gives an appreciative picture of Nuncio Zacchi, and tries to explain to Betto that the Church was not very important in ...”

“... as a bumbling, mock heroic first-person narrator. The wanderer is a more grandiose but equally self-projective figure. In Rushdie’s first novel, the ungainly Grimus (1975), the themes were there but they had not yet found an adequate vehicle. The hero, Flapping Eagle (get it?), is an Axona Indian exiled from the language and the ways of his ancestors. He ...”

“... Deir Yassin Remembered, 5 Galena Road, London W6 OLT.) The return of those exiles in the name of self-determination was Arafat’s proclaimed mission. Only when they were safe in their homes, protected by their own soldiers within their borders, would they avoid further massacres – a goal shared of course by the Zionists on behalf of Europe’s Jews. Many ...”

“... that arose as a result of European colonialism, or simply to dismiss them as the fantasies or self-interested fabrications of the colonial sources. Even in academic anthropology, supposedly a discipline that promotes an awareness and appreciation of cultural difference, the figure of the cannibal has become subject to much sceptical discussion. It is this ...”

“... that made life impossible to plan. Tens of millions of people changed their jobs, homes, class and self-identity as an unprepared but determined state suddenly abolished the market and took control of every element of agriculture, industry and trade. All this would of itself have been traumatic enough, yet the regime decided at the same time to carry out the ...”

“... shown to jump from one idea to another and then back again, his betrayals motivated sometimes by self-interest, sometimes by a childish impulse to bite the hand that fed him. It’s true that his easygoing inconsistency earned him the contempt of both the hardline Communist Siqueiros, and the humanist, independent Orozco. He was also an excellent ...”

“... a set of optimistic exhortations, and volumes on the two Parliamentary chambers have been either self-congratulatory or merely descriptive accounts of unsatisfactory procedures and bad habits. In that short time the landscape has been changed not only by a general election but by Nolan. Some years ago I sat in embarrassment at an international conference on ...”