“... again who opposed the Soviet adventures in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. He introduced self-management to the factories and was duly and generously loved by most of his people. Yugoslav friends of mine who wept when he died now care nothing for Tito’s Communism, however. He’s been gone for ten years and his dream is fading. Rampant nationalism ...”

“... between a man and his wife’s lover about arrangements for the separation leads to a moment of self-discovery which takes its force from the straightforward representation of a kind of bourgeois life now more usually presented with a distancing irony. To say that these stories are beautifully written is too mild, and evasive: they are within, and not ...”

“... verging on the paranoid, for eavesdropping, and for compiling with obsessive thoroughness self-justificatory dossiers on his own actions – the Hu affair was not the only question mark raised against his career. In this instance, the published materials provide ready examples to support Rule’s understanding of Foucquet’s character: the covering ...”

“... for restitution to Jews. There is, finally, the risk that unification will be a great act of self-forgiveness. The division of Germany, however agonising for individuals and painful for the whole nation, was at least a permanent reminder that something had gone terribly wrong in recent German history. With that reminder gone, will the memory ...”

“... of his run of success in the Ottercove world of society and journalism. While Waugh settled into a self-created world of Catholicism as a mock-aristocratic patriarch, Gerhardie remained an indeterminate sort of adventurer to the end, dying in 1977 at the age of 82 in his little flat near the BBC, for whom he had worked in the war years. For a long time he had ...”

“... Tribe Dreaming by Marq de Villiers, a very similar figure (distinguished family, same sort of age, self-exile in America, anguished and appalled): but de Villiers is more impressed by the significance of the liberal Afrikaner strain and more alert to the varieties of Afrikanerdom, including what he describes as the ‘traditions of ...”

“... date, contrives once again to convey original scientific insights excitingly and readably. It is a self-confessedly passionate exposition and defence of Darwinian evolutionary theory against all-comers. Avoiding the awful condescension of so much popular science-writing, which simply assumes that non-specialists cannot be entrusted with the assessment of ...”

“... the tongue; and the delight in exact verbal repetition, so puzzling to many modern readers and so self – evident to anyone who shares in the liturgical tradition of either Judaism or Christianity. ‘The need to utter’ reminds us that what matters in the Bible is not to convey a ‘message’ – as though the Bible were a book of dogmas or a handbook of ...”

“... on the other, the pompous use of native traditions for the moral improvement of the citizens of a self-consciously modern state. These were the two faces of Meiji, which suggest less a dichotomy than a fundamental ambivalence: Westernisation – in the slogan of the day, Enlightenment and Civilisation – was undertaken to defend Japan against the West, not ...”

“... it stands out as a relic of the nanny state, doling out money for a service which ought to be self-financing like everything else. On the Treasury accounts it looks like a huge recurrent subvention to an indigent relative. Nobody with power thinks any longer about its role in making a reality of the myth that we are all equal before the law. Long before ...”

“... Tsarist officials were indeed to prove more effective governors and better prophets than their self-confident critics in the liberal and radical intelligentsia.’ Durnovo argued that no political reform could satisfy the basic socio-economic demands of the Russian masses after 1905 (the failure of the Provisional Government in 1917 was to prove him ...”

“... I take E because I like it. I have a problem with anxiety and depression. When I go out I feel too self-conscious to enjoy myself. When I take E I forget about my problems. I feel like a completely different person. I feel equal to the people around me. I know they are looking at me but I don’t care. Cocaine makes me paranoid. Heroin is too dangerous. I have ...”

“... vision: the external world is inseparable from the sensibility that contemplates it. Passages of self-revelation contained within a larger subject show the growing confidence of her poetic voice. She makes her bleeding heart a pageant for England as Byron supposedly did for all Europe, and includes her personal history, motherhood, family quarrels, debts and ...”

“... the well-meaning terrorist/freedom fighter), but his pitiless irony projects their self-deceptions, too: Eva, befriended in the camp by an English soldier who gives her chocolate, follows him to London after the war, where he turns out to be married. He jilts her, abandoning her in a pub with a gin and tonic. But before we can align ourselves ...”

“... had been stark and business-like, but Musa’s reworking of the core idea is a florid tale of self-redemption. Crace isn’t offering his readers tips about how to stay alive in a Biblical wilderness, but a parable about the novelist’s relation to reality. It seems that storytelling is one craft about which he feels ambivalent, for Musa, the ...”