“... there is some melancholy comment on the hazards of upper-middle-class life, made entirely without self-pity. Indeed, forged in that cruel fire, the stepsons emerge with a remarkable sense of purpose and humanity. It would be presumptuous to ask whether the price was too great. Farewell Sidonia also recounts a child’s life, that of a Gypsy child found ...”

“... Indigo is a family history: but the new work is far more ambitious. It combines a remarkably self-assured interweaving of realism, romance and fantasy with a political and moral urgency that were merely hinted at in the author’s earlier writing. Indigo boldly enters such traditionally masculine domains as the imperialist adventure tale, the ‘first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 88 of the Desert War had the same sort of fearsome reputation, as well as being lethal in fact.) A self-educated monarch of the Late Renaissance, Gustavus had studied the rediscovered military treatises of Vegetius and Leo the Isaurian, and he was quite capable of taking a tip or two from the warfare of the ancients. After he was killed winning the battle of ...”

“... Pell’s remarkable portrait, painted by the American artist in 1890, depicts an independent, self-contained and far from lustful woman. The performance Vision of Salome by the Canadian dancer Maud Allan shocked audiences in music halls throughout Europe a decade later with its ‘feminist and subversive’ mood. Much closer to the current Viennese ...”

“... Statesman. Various backers put money into it, including the remarkable George Jacob Holyoake, a self-educated working man, journalist, author, Chartist, Owenite and atheist: he boldly named one of his sons Robespierre, which must have made the boy’s life hard. He had been imprisoned for blasphemy before joining forces with Lewes and Hunt, and he formed a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to Americans of all backgrounds. The primary effect of ‘dual loyalty’ has been a form of self-censorship that has kept the United States government from dealing rationally and coherently with the strategic and political issues rained by a nuclear-armed Israel ... Can the Arab nations truly be expected to ignore Israel’s possession of atomic weapons ...”

“... whether one likes it or not, rings uncomfortably true. And there is an excellent summary of the self-imposed limitations on the conduct of war that developed during the Clausewitzian era. Finally, there is a passage that is perhaps worth everything else in the book, in which he reminds us that the essential characteristic of soldiers is not that they are ...”

“... IRA and the Catholics, first in the ranks of the B-Specials, then in the RUC. This rigid, angry, self-loving man achieved his apotheosis at Buckingham Palace when he received his MBE. I, his grandson, look at the photographs of this occasion and can see only a flunky. I remember this man shouting at my mother, mocking her for her religion and her persistence ...”

“... the filth of the Madelonnettes prison; he was let out after only 48 hours, but his indestructible self-confidence, his delight in life, died in the cell. Mme Roland went to the guillotine on 1 November, and her husband killed himself in hiding. Two weeks later, Chamfort was told that he was to be rearrested. A hideous suicide attempt followed, in which he ...”

“... on a selective myth of the debacle that minimised its futility and highlighted its glorious self-sacrifices? And how was that myth sustained, and for how long, and how did it come to be revised? Behind all the public pageantry and nostalgia for past heroism, of which Moorhouse is a cravenly enthusiastic supporter, was there anything Bury was ashamed of ...”

“... as Bohr demonstrated, Einstein was wrong and Bohr was finally able to persuade him of the self-consistency of the quantum description of events when it is correctly and fully applied. In his dealings with Einstein, and in his discussions with other physicists, one is struck by Bohr’s intuition and speed of thought in unfamiliar territory. Some found ...”

“... sermonising has always been an important component of his work: he was drawing a youthful self-portrait, after all, when he created Duncan Thaw with his ‘minister’s way of talking about things’. The best parts of his books are often the lengthy bursts of polemic, especially in 1982, Janine where they are put, with cheerful implausibility, into ...”

“... in which they can make unusual sense, a medium which bears them delightedly up, confers on them a self-disciplined freedom that can astonish the land-bound observer. These unoriginal reflections arise from a reading of Rose Tremain’s new novel. In the opinion of the Booker judges there are at least six recently published novels better than this one, and if ...”