“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... top-secret private diaries. Some of the passages he quotes from Brunel are memorable. ‘My self-conceit and love of glory or rather approbation,’ Brunel confided to his diary in October 1827, ‘vie with each other which shall govern me. The latter is so strong that, even on a dark night, riding home, when I pass some unknown person who perhaps does ...”

“... air of defeatism in Macaulay’s person as well as in her work, about which she was consistently self-deprecating: ‘I have no wish to be a great writer. My touch is for trivial topicalities,’ she wrote to her mother. Macaulay was a dowdy woman, and before the age of thirty was well on the way to being a batty spinster in the great English tradition. She ...”

“... Tully attends a meeting where a young leader, Paul, tries to infuse a sense of dignity and self-esteem among his community: Paul ‘asked the young men to stand up one by one and say who they were. One said “a Harijan”. Another: “A scheduled caste – that is, I come from a depressed community.” And one even said: “I am an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a working-class teenager. She is not today’s Angus Wilson nor means to be, but within their self-imposed limits these are immensely enjoyable and successful stories. ‘Enjoyable’ is the word too for Gilbert Adair’s jokey fiction around and about the case of Léopold Sfax, who might be called a philosophical cousin not very removed of Paul de ...”

“... then, the Hillary wars will simply express a new American symptom, a projection of parts of the self that American women love to ...”

“... innocent, and if people are exasperated by her failure to notice that she is unloved, it is this self-deception which protects her from the cruelty she meets with at the end. Tolstaya cleverly does not show her reaction to this final blow. Irony is the main flavour of the story not sentiment. When Zhenechka’s charges were young she wrote out a motto for ...”

“... resistance, he was ideally placed to observe, both in the field and at headquarters, the growing self-confidence of the Partisans, the increasing tension between them and their Western allies, and their growing reluctance to take part in any operations that were not specifically intended both to increase their grip on liberated territory and to extend the ...”

“... in fish factories, depriving many Inuit of their livelihoods, and more of their independence and self-respect. By the end of the Seventies, the suicide rate in Greenland had become the highest in the world, and the homicide rate was comparable to that in a war zone. Miss Smilla is a remorseless, unforgettable indictment of this colonial history. In this way ...”

“... their napkins. Usvatov is not a hypocrite, indeed he hardly has the strength for it, but he is self-deceiving almost beyond redemption. He is supposed to be a playwright, although his plays are written for him by an obsequious young colleague, always on tap, and when a distinguished old horror of a guest toasts his ‘creativity’ he even manages a few ...”

“... Adolphe’s subjection to Eléonore, and Proust conclude that love was a monstrous illusion and self-deception. Jack’s goodness melted him. ‘He used to answer me when I told him how I loved him “I believe you.” He never asked me for a farthing; he was always honourable and good and affectionate.’ Leeves was obsessed by his looks. ‘It was then ...”

“... a legitimate grievance, and the sinking was widely construed as, like the Libya strike, an act of self-defence. But neither of these decisions should have been made. And if the consequences of the Falklands engagement are no longer thought by British experts to threaten British interests, if for these experts the Belgrano has now at last been sunk for ...”