“... 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 ...”

“... allow it: if it did, the imposition of the writer’s will would seem arbitrary. In any case, the self-absorption of the characters provides them with a certain degree of protection. The children trying in their vulnerable egotism to make sense of the same quality in grown-ups, or the irritability of the dying with the living who won’t see or do what they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pattern of entwined flowers. Another has its three digits – 149 – stuck to the front gate with self-adhesive stickers. The numerals are black-on-silver and slant like italics. Not so long ago I would have held all this in contempt – curtains chosen to match wallpaper, the lifelike statuette of a cat about to pounce from the garage roof, the half-barrel ...”

“... have galloped the length and breadth of Eurasia leaving strangely mutilated versions of their own self-designation hither and yon in the chronicles of baffled and anxious scribes thousands of miles apart. Was Attila the Hun actually trying to pose as Attila the Hsiung-nu, and if so, why? Might he even have been the real thing? We shall probably never ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his or her life. Often, perhaps usually, this sensitivity varies independently of the projects of self-creation which the person undertakes in his or her work. I can clarify what I mean by ‘chance events’ and by ‘independent variation’ by sketching a slightly different possible world – a world in which Heidegger joins his fellow ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or brainwashed, by manuals of etiquette, supported by the precepts of Martin Tupper and the self-help exhortations of Samuel Smiles. One essential was to know the rules of good conversation. In their earlier years these strivers might well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler ...”

“... carry much the same kind of passport as their fellow Europeans; and that brave vestige of British self-consequence, ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires ...’, may fade from memory. The Empire has long since faded, and this means that the monarchy’s global pretensions – like its world-wide tours – are a thing of the ...”

“... books. Not for her, on the other hand – at least in this book – the existential doubts and self-questionings of the ethnographer. Half etiquette book, half ‘anatomy’, as sheer voracious and triumphant encyclopedism this brimming book could, however, hardly be bettered. In reading it one feels oneself to be observing the Chinese Scustom of attending ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to what is considered politically correct in arts faculties. But other aspects of Jenkyns’s self-assurance are more troubling. It comes as a shock to encounter the assumptions behind his generalising characterisations of national identity, as he speculates on whether ‘the British are by temper more empirical, less theoretical than the Germans.’ This ...”

“... 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 ...”