“... the domain of Yiddishness, but it too deprives him of himself – or perhaps he has never had a self? Only the rabbis who were both Max’s and Singer’s father and grandfathers possessed that, when they immersed themselves in the Torah. Singer’s father said to him: ‘The Torah is bottomless. No matter how much one studies one can never grasp all of ...”

“... basing herself on Penny) that his face was ‘set in a perpetual sneer, the sneer of self-hatred that had come to include her too’. He was dismayed and horrified when she left him, and wrote to say so. His letter to her is more coherent but less expressive than Tusker’s apology to Lucy, written just before his death. Scott wrote to his ...”

“... that are important beyond all this fiddle. It cannot have been easy for one who can lose him self, as Said can, in the apparently autonomous structures and private pleasures of music to take this line, but a sense of civic or intellectual duty drags him away from contemplation and compels him to write about these ‘worldly’ matters. More germane to ...”

“... doctor John Conolly says some shrewd things here, and the extracts suggest that asylums need self-government, not abolition. This Faber anthology helps the current debate on the closing down of large institutions by insisting that an admission of dialectical craziness – mad doctors meet mad patients – be accompanied by a defence of the asylum ...”

“... demonstrations and stunts. The dockers’ victory and its consequence, an astounding surge in the self-confidence of the British working class, was a lesson to Tom Mann all his life. He saw how the workers, in the course of their own action, changed from hopeless down-and-outs into enthusiastic, disciplined and rational human beings. It was a change, he ...”

“... a Romanian speaking excellent English picks up the phone. ‘Who is this?’ I demand with as much self-righteousness as I can muster. ‘Oh, do excuse me, this is a foreign trade company. You must have the wrong number.’And then there is the notorious Intercontinental Hotel, which has been described by one former Romanian intelligence chief as less a hotel ...”

“... from the almost abstract hi-tech-speak of the white-collar worker. ‘I think it would be in your self-interest as well as ours,’ Dark-suit No 1 is saying, ‘if you could see your way to this before too long, because he is one of the key councillors.’ ‘If we don’t discuss the pros and cons of what’s been happening,’ Dark-suit No 2 ...”

“... was 25, his friend the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann told him he thought him capable of love and self-sacrifice. Wedekind was not particularly pleased: ‘for me such feelings denote weakness rather than strength. They would not reinforce my moral fibre, but undermine me.’ It sounds as though he might be planning a toughening-up programme for himself. The ...”

“... whine. He reacts badly to criticism or challenge, like a man who feels a carefully constructed self-image is under improper duress. Essentialists can search for continuity of political belief in the man, some backbone of principle stiffening his curriculum vitae, but such investigation, if conducted with any degree of realism, is not encouraging, and ...”

“... back to the poet, as Edward Thomas’s strange excitements would refer them: the absence of self is the real offering in Blunden’s poems. Like Ralph Hodgson, whom he knew well in Japan, he suffers from anthologies, and his poetry is best browsed through. He made great friends with Adrian Bell, the country novelist who wrote Corduroy and became the ...”

“... process of national formation begun during the 1948 War of Independence. Far from being a war of self-defence, the 1967 campaign, as seen by the Right, liberated the national patrimony and secured the true historical boundaries of the Jewish state. At the same time, a messianic nationalist movement emerged out of the traditionally moderate Zionist Party. The ...”

“... transferred from oneself to a malignant world, there is no cause for personal reproach or loss of self-esteem.’ Let me admit that I only remember this because I wrote it: but the observation that ‘she has readily descended to the platitudes of economic chauvinism when co-operation with foreign governments has been on the agenda’ brings a disconcerting ...”

“... that – which leaves the unsatisfactory but virtually certain role of recurrent returnee, of a self-disgusted but necessary tourism. The hard question is about the storm to come – you can smell it in the air. It’s a storm that’s been coming all of Breytenbach’s life, maybe longer. Perhaps we shall avoid the very worst – though even civil war is ...”

“... from Greece’s northern provinces. At one point, the Greek Communist Party advocated self-determination for the Slav Macedonians, which would have meant detaching a large part of northern Greece that had been won from the Turks during the Balkan wars of 1912-13. It is events such as these, many well within living memory (President ...”

“... implausibility of the idea that Mr Smith’s death alone could reverse the irreversible, the too self-conscious symbolism of the whole thing, which suggests that people were not welcoming a restoration: they were, rather, bidding a fond farewell to a political system whose passing they regretted but which they knew to be gone. Yet there is no reason why the ...”