“... the first time. A more or less trivial character study of two silly American females as seen by a self-satisfied, dense European sophisticate turns into a philosophical meditation about the vanity (Vane) of human denials of supernatural survival. One is sent back to more than this story. One is sent back to all of Nabokov’s best fiction, to reread it for ...”

“... to alter it by virtue of some sort of inertia. He doesn’t endorse the various theories of a self-compensating effect in human interactions with technology, such as the Conservation of Catastrophe, which suggests that things go wrong about as often, no matter what changes, or ‘risk homeostasis’, which argues that we habitually maintain risk at a ...”

“... no concept of liberty, no autonomous corporate institutions and assemblies, no ‘city’, no self-confident middle class. Many of the institutions through which popular power is channelled in Western societies originated in the Church, the paradigm for the corporate bodies through which power is now routinised and mediated in impersonal ...”

“... of these sacred accessories is itself a symbol of growing economic and religious freedom in Cuba. Self-employment is allowed as a means of rescuing the country from the financial pass it has found itself in since Moscow stopped the cheques half a dozen years ago. And last year Cubans enjoyed their first real Christmas for almost forty years, emboldened by ...”

“... of the soluble, and hurl oneself at the seemingly insoluble, requires unusual, perhaps messianic self-confidence. Cosmologists in particular belong to a calling that predisposes to extravagant (if intellectually rarefied) conjecture. Horgan quotes the opinion of an eminent particle physicist that quantum cosmology, time-reversal and wormholes between ...”

“... equivalents of Kilmuir and Dilhorne. Black was a Methodist lay preacher; Sir Cyril Osborne, a self-made businessman, informed the Commons that he had been ‘brought up as a Victorian by a very stern Victorian father’ and knew it was perfectly possible for homosexuals to control themselves if they were sufficiently determined. Although Berkeley won the ...”

“... politics paper with a radical American feminist who fiercely declaimed the truths that were self-evident to her, if not to others. William, when asked, would always smile happily and say he agreed with everything she’d said. In the end he was so amiable and agreeable that his tutors started to feel he’d lost his intellectual edge. Gloomily, we began ...”

“... had been stark and business-like, but Musa’s reworking of the core idea is a florid tale of self-redemption. Crace isn’t offering his readers tips about how to stay alive in a Biblical wilderness, but a parable about the novelist’s relation to reality. It seems that storytelling is one craft about which he feels ambivalent, for Musa, the ...”

“... the well-meaning terrorist/freedom fighter), but his pitiless irony projects their self-deceptions, too: Eva, befriended in the camp by an English soldier who gives her chocolate, follows him to London after the war, where he turns out to be married. He jilts her, abandoning her in a pub with a gin and tonic. But before we can align ourselves ...”

“... our fear that it could well be our turn next. But there is more to this suspense assault than mere self-interest. Each snippet of cockpit dialogue is saturated in dramatic irony: we know what the speakers do not know, at least not yet. At the same time, this stuff is all for real: real life, real death. Our superior knowledge has no value – not even the ...”

“... and at the time of writing it seems as if he will survive, at least partly as a result of his own self-declared impotence. A better prospect emerged from the train drivers’ union which threatened to strike if proper safety equipment was not installed immediately. At the same time, the workers at Ford, Dagenham, threatened to strike against constant ...”

“... of themselves as outsiders, solitaries, especially if they were writers before they turned to self-revelation. Certainly this book is written. For all the evidence that the atmosphere of his home was ‘saturated with unhappiness’ the book that describes it sounds reasonably contented. The crazed grandmother, driving everybody mad as she went about ...”

“... development programme . . . I expected nothing from abroad . . . The emergence of India as a self-reliant country in the field of guided missiles upset all the developed nations of the world, but innovation cannot be suppressed by international restrictions . . . On the night of 15 January 1991, the Gulf War broke out between Iraq and the Allied Forces ...”

“... the game to such an extent that he comes to forget that real chessboards exist. Yet he is just as self-interested as Czentovic: he needs chess to survive; but it nearly kills him. While the brute is able to use chess as his instrument of power, the intellectual finds himself nearly eaten alive from the inside out. That, of course, is what Zweig always feared ...”

“... 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 ...”