“... 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 characters and the sentences themselves are best forgotten. If it wasn’t for his self-aggrandising tendencies (and his unpleasant, reductive stereotypes) he would probably just be accepted as a bracing broad-brush satirist, a set-piece artist with a terrific ear. Perhaps it’s not literature, in the Tolstoy or Dickens sense, but it’s not ...”

“... a day, never fewer – though she keeps her work to herself. The novel is an examination of her self-enclosed life, from the inside. Every page is a network of the allusions, quotations and references that bind her thinking into coherence, if not into sense. There isn’t much she hasn’t read, or doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis ...”

“... From her grandfather, an admirer of Marcus Garvey, she heard the message of racial pride and self-discipline, lessons reinforced at the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls. For a few years, she attended this institution for blacks founded after the Civil War by Northern missionaries, until the Klan ran the headmaster out of town and forced the school ...”

“... like the rest of us have or will, she has grown into an older woman who looks back on her former self with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. From being ‘innocent and warm-hearted’ when she arrived in London in 1959, she became, she explained to her son Seymour, as he was growing up, ‘wild and naughty’. But she emphatically denies ever being ...”

“... violation of the UN Charter, which forbids the unauthorised use of force except in situations of self-defence, will not be condemned by the Council because the US will cast (or threaten to cast) its veto. Condemnations from individual countries will be dismissed as statements that merely conceal – but do not deny – a growing acceptance that American ...”

“... to charm – as canny rascal, showman, country recluse. Dilworth really is post-metropolitan, self-banished, making a career out of not having a career. He drifted to the Hebrides with a roofing scam, putting up housing units. Which came to include his own. He stayed, and stayed. Years of taking a bucket across to the beach to scavenge for mussels. Like ...”

“... and common sense alone. In that sense Perkin’s story is different from those of the often self-educated inventors who Samuel Smiles celebrated in the Lives of the Engineers. But Smiles would have understood and appreciated Perkin’s tenacity and competence, his skill as a chemical engineer and his abilities as a businessman, the determination with ...”

“... overeating; and the restaurant, the now ubiquitous setting for the public display of private self-absorption. Restaurants gave people a place to go where they could ignore others, but also observe them. One could remain anonymous or be seen – at the latest place or at the best table. Unless, of course, one was condemned to play that other, equally ...”

“... stone till water begins to drip through. The lake shrinks, and the prince in a moment of supreme self-sacrifice offers his body to plug the hole. When he is almost drowned, he is saved by the princess, whose tears are for the first time truly human, and are followed by rain. She regains gravity; the lake fills; the witch is buried in her flooded ...”

“... he tagged, with characteristically biting humour, ‘the thirty-year war’ between himself and self-appointed Jewish custodians of the Holocaust. He confesses: ‘it has taken me some time to absorb what I should always have known, that in my whole approach to the study of the destruction of the Jews I was pitting myself against the main current of Jewish ...”

“... from a persistent fear that its citizens might be simulating their loyalties. There is something self-perpetuating about this kind of paranoia and the struggle to eradicate its legacy continues to this day. Fitzpatrick’s concept of imposture could be used as a way of examining not only Soviet society but also the Soviet regime: a regime obsessed not only ...”

“... or the ‘free world’. But because, in classic missionary style, both sides saw their truths as self-evident, their programmes as beneficial, and their own benevolence as beyond question, they often had no rational explanation to offer when their projects failed and their clients turned against them. In these cases, there was often an astonishingly rapid ...”

“... conceived as a simple refuge from history, but an ordered, serene nature, secluded from its wilder self. Wars and gardens are both natural as well as historical phenomena (or are experienced as such), but perhaps, Helphand suggests, rehearsing the frail hopes of his gardening subjects, there is another, consoling, nature – and thus, maybe, another history ...”

“... his function as ‘the judge’, and now elderly and retired – has been locked into brutalising self-disgust since his years at Cambridge long ago. There, he ‘learned to take refuge in the third person and to keep everyone at bay’; now, he beats his cook as he used to beat his wife. Biju, the cook’s son, is an illegal immigrant working in New York ...”