“... 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 ...”

“... on an anguished debate about the possibility of maintaining one’s integrity in a corrupt, self-seeking society that demands lies and collusion. Written in exile, these books were strongly anti-Fascist in tone, and, when translated, contributed to making Mussolini’s regime less popular abroad in the mid-1930s than it had been ten years ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... heart of darkness. At the time it was clear that there was no chance of getting in touch with your self unless you had witnessed what nature had so perversely, so patriarchally, hidden from your view. Though it seems odd, on those grounds, that we didn’t also require a personal view of our anuses, the goal was a sighting of the cervix, a seeing into the very ...”

“... the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of ...”

“... Throughout the foothills, meanwhile, free-range McMansions – often castellated in unconscious self-caricature – occupy rugged ocean-view peaks surrounded by what foresters grimly refer to as ‘diesel stands’ of dying pine and old brush.The loss of more than 90 per cent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom ...”

“... effectively already written the book that Pierce is wanting to write, and with a slightly weary self-referentiality the prefatory matter of his unfinished book is almost exactly the same as the ‘author’s note’ to The Solitudes, which begins: ‘More even than most books are, this is a book made out of other books.’ Kraft’s works – and those of ...”

“... it occurred ‘before daybreak on a Sunday, probably on 9 April, AD 30’. But this exactitude is self-defeating, because it stands alone with nothing else chronologically labelled to give it validity. Vermes mentions the Jewish martyrs of the Maccabean period, men who died for the Torah and were presumed, like modern suicide bombers, to receive a heavenly ...”

“... responds that since Hamas’s declared intention is to destroy it, Israel’s right of self-defence extends to the destruction of Hamas, regardless of the cost to life: another Holocaust is underway and must be prevented, and any action it takes becomes proportionate because of the imperative to prevent such an outcome. All those who disagree ...”

“... would in fact make more sense in the post-1919 world of the Comintern, as questions of national self-determination took on revolutionary importance in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. Connolly might well have flourished in this context, but in 1916 he was ahead of his time. The reconquest of Ireland that he desired could be achieved because the ...”

“... stooge … No, not me; I’m queer. I’m queer for myself, for my selfhood, queer for this queer self I find myself to be, queer with strange appetites, and a heart that throbs most queerly. I’m queer for other queers, queer for their shapes and colours and sizes, queer for their tastes …And so forth. It’s a given that you’ll be on Zachary’s side ...”

“... bullshit (her narrative contains lots of two-column lists), she decides that although Celine’s self-deception requires more ‘cognitive energy’ than her own determined hedonism, it doesn’t produce better results. What neither of them seems to want is clarity: ‘You don’t always need the full story,’ Celine says. Accordingly, Phoebe refrains for ...”

“... killed my child.’ After being bullied on the platform and then flooded with content to do with self-harm, a Muslim girl attempted suicide. Maryam, having to deal with the media attention and the trending hashtag #JusticeForTahera, goes on the offensive. A colleague digs up an incriminating photo of Tahera’s father, the ‘nation’s favourite ...”

“... in 610 BC, long before the word ‘philosophy’ was coined: such antiquity freed him from the self-consciousness that constrained later philosophers. Unlike uptight Plato and obsessive Aristotle, whom Nietzsche dismissed as having survived accidentally, Anaximander was a free thinker, voyaging through new constellations of thought. He was far from ...”

“... soldiers, though one of them, a new arrival, Agnes, is not a fellow at all.Agnes’s strength and self-containment remind him of Nkechi, his childhood friend; despite their long separation, he still harbours romantic feelings for her. When relations with Agnes become more intimate, he’s baffled. ‘Why does she like me?’ he asks Felix, who has an earnest ...”