“... light. The country comes across as a rough, small-minded, land-grabbing settler culture, based on self-serving fictions and violence, forever dogged by feelings of inferiority towards Europe and America. As one of the characters in his last novel, Theft (2006), concisely puts it, ‘We Australians are really shit. We know nothing. We are so bloody ...”

“... 1948. The wartime ideologue Ishiwara Kanji, called as a witness, argued against the tribunal’s self-serving mandate of investigating events only from 1928 onwards. The causes of the war should be sought, he argued, in the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Perry’s demand that Japan open its doors to friendship with the United ...”

“... political life, as well as about the many ways in which individual rationality may be collectively self-defeating. But there is more to politics than individuals acting out of calculated self-interest: both calculation and self-interest may be conspicuously lacking. Consider, for a ...”

“... of dialogues with the psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz in which they ruminated on the nature of the self. Coetzee’s contributions are attractively hesitant and undogmatic. He puts his ideas forward tentatively, as if puzzled by what a lifetime of reflection has disclosed to him. He admits to having no direct experience of therapy but is clearly knowledgeable ...”

“... themselves, even while the images from Abu Ghraib suggest that there is no foundation for such self-serving discriminations between them and us. Perhaps one of the most shocking things Freud did in Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in 1921 was to cut from an image of the ‘masses’, not far from that of an uncontrollable mob, to the church and ...”

“... an alarming concentration of power – there was nothing innocent about the joke. Walpole’s self-promotion was a standard target, but Fielding’s sly participle gave a new twist to the usual complaint, and suggests how unlike a ministering angel an exponent of prime ministering might be. Yet there was also something distinctly ...”

“... The great experimental chemist of the previous generation, Joseph Priestley, had believed it self-evident that the progress of reason and science would lead to a general reformation of religion and politics: ‘The English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical ...”

“... suggests, of a marriage between Wilde and Tolstoy, a writer he revered. He was a compulsive self-publicist, but it was never without a generous dash of self-irony. ‘I find myself while still in middle life,’ he observed, ‘almost as legendary a person as the Flying Dutchman.’ This volume, rich in photos and ...”

“... down to see whether one of these sentences isn’t poking out of her side.’They’re also less self-enclosed than they appear. The surreal images in The Book of Words, and the monologue’s disjointed structure, eventually resolve with disturbing clarity: as an infant, the narrator was taken from her birth parents, who were ‘disappeared’ in a dirty war ...”

“... interest in the upbringing of his oldest and most unruly daughter – ‘A child more obstinately self-willed I certainly never came across’ – and Mary was exiled from the family in a succession of more or less unhappy boarding-schools. She was briskly despatched to relatives for the holidays, and only reunited with her parents at the age of ...”

“... to regard the 19th-century Rothschilds as bankers, plutocrats and social climbers than as the self-appointed spokesmen of ‘the Jewish community’. And in the East End of London, the elemental problems of working-class life – birth, survival and death – were essentially the same, regardless of ethnic identity or national origin. If it is difficult ...”

“... days he attributed everything to the Divine Will. The activities of this marvel or monster of self-deception are recalled by his son with a flat literalness more effective than moral indignation or satiric exposure could ever have been. ‘He left us all his egotism, as our mother left us her racing tongue’ is the final word delivered, not by the ...”

“... and finance boom of the Eighties, small, independent publishers, able to expand thanks to the self-same boom, fall over themselves to plug the gap. Virago Crime, Women’s Press Science Fiction, and a welter of smaller, now failed imprints, were and are a mixture of the odd inspired reprint, a lot of ‘rediscovered’ second-raters, and new material ...”

“... his gnawing hunger for advancement, his insatiable appetite for intrigue, and his odd mixture of self-importance and self-doubt. He was a fusser, a buttonholer, a clasper of shoulders, a pacer of lobbies, at least metaphorically a listener at keyholes, endlessly obsessed by the narcissistic gossip and jockeying for ...”

“... tragedy. Its force lies in its striking deployment of the argument for collectively redemptive self-criticism. But Habermas is not easy to read. It is not just that he writes very badly, like many men struggling to articulate a vision that is obscure even to them. It is also that he writes within the German tradition of Kritik. This comes down at least ...”