“... to evidence and basic logic (resistance can only result from ignorance, speciesist prejudice and self-interest). But it seems odd for him to say, as he does towards the end of the book, that the claims of Animal Liberation Now ‘at no point … require acceptance of utilitarianism’. His arguments often look like utilitarian arguments; they are certainly ...”

“... go into detail: it is Steinberg’s task to elaborate. A curious mix of ‘prestige, humanity and self-interest’, he finds, ‘fused in the Italian determination’ not to go along. Perhaps primarily ‘it had become a matter of ... honour ... the last shred of honour left’ in a war Italy was losing. And, most curiously, this resistance ‘was carried out ...”

“... on that shame-making interlude, where the Mountbattens appear to have sustained their usual self-loving impression of doing their level best against frightful odds. One teensy moment, though, is worth savouring. In 1945 Edwina paid a flying visit to Saigon, where the British General Gracey was in the process of restoring the pre-war status quo. The ...”

“... the innate romanticism beating up beneath. ‘My whole life,’ he writes, in a rare moment of self-revelation, ‘has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavour of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific.’ Of course. And the counterpart of this exacting intellect was the camera-coolness of his eye. His descriptions are ...”

“... a cloak of irony and never quite losing his admiration for their fortitude with all its defects of self-righteousness and mean-spiritedness. The newcomer to Keillor ought, I am afraid, to start off by reading either Leaving Home or Lake Wobegon Days. The new book is a collection of oddments, many of which do not work nearly as well as they do on stage ...”

“... appeared in the New York Times. Most of the Beats, Kerouac included, were out for nihilistic self-destructive fun of a kind which, as forecast by their elder statesman Kenneth Rexroth, implied the abandonment of all civilised values, and their own early deaths. Ginsberg was different. He really was looking for a mystical truth that might be reached ...”

“... but also maddeningly, seems to have no such sense of standing alone in the world. The restless, self-conscious, capricious style of Expensive Habits suggests that she cannot always believe either in her story or in her mission to tell it. Her subtly entertaining and thought-provoking novel deals, like The Injured Party, with such matters as parent-children ...”

“... for Belgrade. The people here are Slovenians, tall, fine-looking and Roman in their grace and self-assurance. A few (Croats?) are small and fierce and heavily-moustached, and look as if they are taking a day off from herding the goats. ‘Ah, partisans!’ I find myself thinking. There is a good deal of smoking and they kiss as if it had just come off the ...”

“... Soldier inexplicably fussy. Ford’s quite copious poetry can also put one off by its seemingly self-indulgent lack of concentration, but Pound gave reasons for admiring it. In this country Ford has enjoyed the advocacy of Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett, but the busiest and also the most effective of Ford’s admirers have been American. Though Carcanet ...”

“... hopes in a democratisation of the political system by way of the institutions of ‘socialist self-management’. The Serb national programme had to be rewritten in the new language of democracy and economic modernisation. The Communists were faced with a particularly difficult task in Serbia, where identification with a centralised Yugoslavia had deep ...”

“... who, in recent years, has done most to retrieve and consolidate the idea of Picasso as the self-conscious heir to the Spanish tradition, submitting himself to the influence of archaic Iberian art, Catalan Romanesque, El Greco, Goya, and it is in this identification of himself as a Spaniard, as a Spanish man – above all, as a Spanish artist – that ...”

“... value’. It follows that any theory to the contrary should be re-examined because it is producing self-evidently ridiculous results. This is to say, not, of course, that works of art can be considered – or were ever considered except briefly in the 1890s – as wholly autonomous, with an existence separate from the social and moral values by which we ...”

“... a liberal reform of the franchise in 1870, Russia’s town halls continued to be run by small self-interested circles of wealthy merchants and patricians, who stalled urgent social expenditures to keep taxes low. By the turn of the century, the working-class districts of Russia’s great cities looked more like Bombay than Berlin. Poor and overcrowded ...”

“... critic Samir al-Khalil makes an eloquent case for regarding this ‘Socialism’ as National, self-consciously based on dogmas of Führer-prinzip and total mobilisation. Iraq has long enjoyed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, intimate contacts with China and trading relations with several capitalist states, notably France, the United States and ...”

“... his cool thoughts of beating her senseless with his shoe heel.’ And they strangle as part of a self-development project: If he were interviewed he would say, ‘It was terrific! There’s nothing in the world like it.’ (‘Would you do it again, Mr Bruno?’) ‘Well, I might,’ reflectively, with caution, as an arctic explorer when asked if he will ...”