“... employees, where the SPD gained 6 per cent nationwide, and pulled over significant numbers of the self-employed, some of them former Green supporters. There was little gender variance in the vote, with the exception of young women under 24, who went for the SPD much more strongly than their male counterparts. The truly dramatic change, however, came in the ...”

“... posture and stiff walk of the chronic sufferer from back pain, he communicated an attractive self-confidence. The Centre occupies offices on the sixth floor of the Bakri Building, downtown Ramallah’s largest, its ground floor filled with souvenir and shoe-shops. Wadie’s relationship with Hassan is almost fraternal, though Wadie keeps the deferential ...”

“... would prevail and not take it out too badly on the old man. My brother was not only tough and self-destructive, he was handsome. He was fit as hell – hundreds of push-ups and the rest – and he had a good-looking mug: good bones, a nicely shaped head, straight nose, brown eyes, full mouth. A bit like the young Marlon Brando, in fact, especially around ...”

“... in 1846, helped to establish her credentials as a shrewd social critic. Anna Leonowens, another self-reliant woman, also saw that she could make literature out of her experiences. In 1870 she wrote a titillating and entirely untrustworthy account of working as a governess to the family of King Mongkut of Siam, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (it ...”

“... country or in a Cambridge college, or travelling a lot, he achieved such public eminence. Always self-deprecating, he nevertheless understood his own stature; in his commonplace book he privately compared his powers with those of other writers, including Eliot, and judged himself superior. It must be allowed that he had many admiring friends, and his name ...”

“... allowed to continue to work at GTMO, but without any retirement rights. In 1979, Jimmy Carter – self-proclaimed champion of human rights – softened this policy, decreeing that Cubans who commuted to the base would receive a government pension. But this decision – which simply gave workers what was owed to them – applied only to those who retired after ...”

“... that Chen remembers are by the 11th-century poet Su Dongpu: ‘Long, long I lament/there is not a self for me to claim.’ There is another, more benign cultural force at work in these novels, one that ties Chen and his colleagues to China’s past: food. What booze and bars are to the American gumshoe, food is to his Chinese counterpart. Luscious ...”

“... he was with ‘the opposition between the male property instinct and woman’s maternal drive to self-immolation’. Hughes finds a reflection of this concern in the frequency in the operas of interrupted weddings. Wagner also makes use of the related theme of the Fatal Oath, which appeared in many treatments of the biblical Jephtha story, and in the plot of ...”

“... the narrator’s family in A la Recherche, are dealt with purely as a routine expression of Jewish self-hatred. ‘This distancing, this critical glance cast upon one’s own kind,’ Bloch-Dano writes, ‘is a well-known phenomenon: the difficulty of seeing oneself reflected in the gaze of others.’ True enough, but it doesn’t really explain the baroque ...”

“... constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.’But to be excited by the prospect of a great adventure is one thing, to act is another. To make a start, I had to sacrifice some hard-won achievements and joys. For instance colour, about which I had only recently ...”

“... to this place to find something, to connect with something lost, to reunite if not with my whole self, then with a piece of it. What I’ve discovered is that this thing is not here. In fact, it is nowhere. I have learned that my name is not my name. It seems you all know me and nothing could be further from the truth and yet you know me better than I know ...”

“... was a deer . . . I got Gandhi mixed up with Bambi,’ it almost seems like Moore is offering a self-parody. ‘I don’t know – words remind me of other words. Like the word hostage reminds me of sausage.’ When Tassie listens to Christmas music, ‘“Rejoice, rejoice” sounded like “Read Joyce, read Joyce,” and so I did, getting a head start on ...”

“... hid all her life, so that even as she stripped, she remained entirely obscure behind a screen of self-invention. Gypsy, she writes, ‘came to interest me more and I came to like her less.’ Without the performance, she is all ambition and lies; just as without all the marabou fans, she is just a naked lady with a better than average pair of ...”

“... Party. When history is used for the purposes of legitimation, it cannot support any substantial self-critique. The Chinese learned the lesson of Gorbachev’s failure: full recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ brings the entire system down: they must be disavowed. True, some Maoist ‘excesses’ and ‘errors’ were denounced (the Great Leap Forward ...”

“... that their real relevance lies ‘in the connection between the activity of autobiographical self-analysis and the formation of class consciousness’. Much subsequent work has followed his advice. However, Griffin argues – and I think she’s right – that the memoirs span ‘a broad swathe of working-class life’ and that the writers’ families ...”