“... both Gibreel and Saladin, as well as those of Philip II, speak more vividly than can those of the self-centred, sin-and-salvation-centred characters of Graham Greene, precisely because they are anchored in both ancient and modern history, with its migrations and regenerating mixtures. All the books I have mentioned are large partly because they are packed ...”

“... if conversationally. ‘Was it you who took it?’ ‘I’ve never robbed you before,’ he says self-righteously, and goes into the other room. She turns my purse upside down over the couch, sending a cascade of junk onto the clean upholstery. Sitting on the arm of the couch, she sifts through the crumbling map, the little bottles, the twisted ...”

“... often distracting, especially in the two rooms housing the de Chiricos. Happily, they have been self-effacing in the two Futurist rooms. These rooms are surely the organisers’ pride and joy. They have sustained a high level of quality by concentrating mainly on the movement’s two major artists, and have managed to procure the loans of masterpieces by ...”

“... There are moving stories, too, of endurance, and women’s long tradition (or bad habit) of self-sacrifice. This relates to the most persistent theme of all, the double-shift, or (more threateningly) the double-duty. On the one hand, the woman’s job, and, on the same hand, the home and children. Tanya, in Anna Mass’s ‘A Business Trip Home’, is a ...”

“... was a wariness about his eyes which suggested a man who was compelled to make an effort to conquer self-doubt’), and knows what they think and do not think. He is an expert in pain and silence (‘The wave of her misery hit him now, knocking the breath out of him’); but also, rather oddly, a collector of grotesques (the lesbian lady who insists on treating ...”

“... offered by the bulk of the intelligentsia of Western Europe and the US for a Wilsonian concept of self-determination has been disastrous. Little and Silber are justly more sympathetic in their assessment of the 1993 Vance-Owen peace plan than most British commentators. Many British and American journalists, politicians and historians were withering in their ...”

“... is not. Hoare’s own rather tentative estimate of this ‘enormously talented man’ (Coward’s self-description, from which it is hard to dissent) has to be sought out, a sentence or two at a time, throughout these densely packed pages. Mainly the asides are critical: This Happy Breed was ‘an affecting tribute to a mythical England; a Cockney neoromantic ...”

“... tied to a ‘risk of being overwhelmed by the urgency of their impulses’. They suffer from low self-esteem and relative egocentricity. Under stressful conditions, ‘at least six of the nine showed a potential for more or less transient psychotic experiences ... with confused and disordered thinking that can be bizarre, peculiar, or very primitive and ...”

“... Which prizes she won is not recorded – almost all the facts about her life come from a few self-serving interviews. There was nothing in Postmortem to indicate anything other than a modest break-even performance in a competitive field. Nor is there anything outstandingly innovative about Cornwell’s narrator-heroine. Kay Scarpetta is a ...”

“... a grating and often so low a way?’ This examiner was no doubt a norm-alien, searching for that self-conscious purity of intellectual style that would express itself, as another graduate of the ENS fondly recalled, in the fact that ‘everyone’ (that’s to say, every graduate from the rue d’Ulm) ‘knows perfectly well’ that every night in the ...”

“... all while effecting economies: the labour of ‘low-grade’ defectives would make such colonies self-financing. Who was to deny that such solutions made sense? Certainly, few of the mentally handicapped could raise voices of complaint (‘Mother says it done me good,’ wrote one imbecile of life in a colony). Time was when relatives had been quite ...”

“... reinforced by cultural change. It began with the invention of printing, and was reinforced by the self-conscious change from the culture of the image to the culture of the word implicit in the Reformation. This is the change which has gone into reverse since the invention of television. Increasingly, people wanting to capture the attention of a school class ...”

“... or the indolent disposition to succumb to tyranny. Love can also lose its way amid idleness and self-absorption. The Arcadia is saturated with the language of political morality, but it also teems with references to a political pathology of the heart: ‘vehement love’, ‘torments’, ‘hellish agony’, ‘disease’. And here, too, we sense the ...”

“... in common with her father than with her mother, had, at the age of 17, run off with one of those self-same South Americans and was now living with him in Caracas. At this point, Mme de Blazac’s tiny hands were pressed to her eyes, while I maintained a respectful silence. To my relief I was never asked about myself, and in Mme de Blazac’s heartbroken ...”

“... match he complained of fatigue, one could see why: he’d been tight as a drum. Nick Bollettieri, self-styled ‘best tennis coach in the world’, claims he can help prevent such collapses, a view shared (for varying periods of time) by Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Monica Seles, Mary Pierce, Jim Courier, Anna Kournikova and Mark Philippousis, among ...”