“... guessing statisticians will also tell us that (c) you’re more likely to die from a self-inflicted knife wound than a shark attack.) If you are dragged under, you are supposed to get aggressive rather than play dead: sharks’ extraordinary sensitivity to electromagnetic fields means that they can detect the heartbeats even of immobile ...”

“... the Clock, but by my Chair; for when that informs me my Pound of Food is exhausted I conclude my self to be hungry, and lay in another with all Diligence. In my Days of Abstinence I lose a Pound and an half, and on solemn Fasts am two Pounds lighter than on other Days in the Year.’ Weighing yourself to assuage your fears was one thing; gambling on your ...”

“... jollies or visiting their aunts in Ramat Ha-Sharon. This is tourism responding to Israel’s self-marketing as a ‘true crossroads of the world’. The government has been at pains to sell itself as a normal, fun country: it can host the Eurovision song contest! Or a stage of the Giro d’Italia! It can put on a fantastic Pride Parade, and lure Jennifer ...”

“... is to be read differently depending on the shape and size of the bubble that encases it. Some are self-explanatory: a spiky bubble indicates exclamation. Others are less clear: a voice ‘echoing in the head’ – a deity perhaps, or a malevolent spirit – appears as free-floating text encircled by thin strokes. The subtle, percussive style of manpu sets ...”

“... that if I smile I might get out of this alive!”’ Tambu is a complex figure with a talent for self-destructive behaviour, a woman who betrays friends, alienates family and – out of envy or misjudgment – sabotages her own best interests.Later in the novel, Tambu has a disagreement with her cousin Nyasha, to whom she was close as a teenager and whose ...”

“... is proof enough of that). For all these reasons – honour, morality, value for money, self-interest – there is a cast-iron case for preserving and wisely using the aid and development budget. Unfortunately, not everyone sees it this way. Old habits are beginning to reassert themselves. Other parts of government are beginning to cast envious ...”

“... sprawl in his writing that has become more marked over the last decade (with the exception of the self-contained novella Blueback, 1997) is probably deliberate. Winton writes intense and hugely absorbing novels that make you really want to know what is going to happen next – but he is aiming, too, to make reading them a moral ...”

“... she can’t escape being defined by her dress. Her untidiness had been understood as a lack of self-respect, not as stylishness. A local rebel, Dawn (‘back-combed hair and chalk-white eyelids’), provides a useful lesson: ‘Wouldn’t catch me wearing someone else’s rags. My Mum wouldn’t let me out the house in that!’ She strutted away with her ...”

“... list of phrases taken from the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook, for example) and the use of self-help clichés to explain her characters’ motivations are distracting, as are her poorly constructed sentences and tendency to change tense several times within a paragraph or even within a sentence. Sometimes her style seems conscientiously to mimic the ...”

“... he can barely hide his own surprise, and what makes him interesting is the shadow of his other self, the serfdom he never quite escaped. The young Aleksandr didn’t exactly start from scratch. His grandfather, a cobbler, drowned in his fifties after an undistinguished life of hard work, taverns and conjugal rows. But his father, Vasily ...”

“... the magnificent Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the benefactor of the musician Palestrina’. He is a self-absorbed, ambitious young man with very few interests or accomplishments that would mark him out as a scion of the cultural Renaissance. Benvenuto Cellini, who claimed Ippolito had an ‘evil nature’, portrayed him as manipulative and untrustworthy, and ...”

“... years; a girl in whom her mother takes a sporadic, detached interest; a peculiarly intelligent, self-possessed and furba (‘cunning’) child: these are leitmotifs of Bedford’s novels. Among the many middles of her memoir, the dead centre would seem to be the real end of her mother’s story, left unconcluded in Jigsaw. It was near Sanary in the South of ...”

“... into the picture – Kingdon more literally than most, since many of his illustrations are wry self-portraits. For him, the creatures that travelled up the rivers from the coast were precursors of man the ...”

“... The last eight chapters contain speculations about the future. They include a vision of self-reproducing automata, which may alter the appearance of deserts, and ultimately perhaps of the solar system. He points out that the nature of such developments is critically dependent on time-scale, on whether a generation of these automata is comparable to ...”

“... The Strange Museum marks, as they say, an interesting development. The poems here are less self-contained, more resonant and suggestive, than those earlier ones. Paulin, moreover, now speaks with a distinct personal voice and, like Muldoon, though more sombrely, can lead the mind into strange corners, many of them unswept for years – as in the title ...”