“... and another to claim that it is their defining feature. Israel has recast antisemitism in such a self-serving way that it has become difficult to distinguish between those who take Israel to task as a Jewish state, and those who criticise it as a Jewish state: as an exclusionary ethnocracy and an occupying power. Israel has also appropriated the right to ...”

“... grief. After 1918 magic was no longer just an emanation from the cosmos, but something inside the self, closer to the unconscious and subconscious states around which psychology and psychiatry would build new ways of understanding how people ...”

“... separate to themselves, an embodiment of Otherness.’ ‘Otherness’ here, as conceived by this self-important TV don, is a term belonging to sociology or his daughter’s English lectures. In the novel it is a matter of lived experience. White characters constantly ‘other’ black characters: a fellow student shouts at Carole that she’s ‘so ...”

“... status. Leiris thought of them as ‘juxtaposed, rather than grouped’, but they have the quiet self-consciousness of kin gathered for a family occasion. Genet was intrigued by something even more striking when he was hanging out in Giacometti’s studio. The finished stand-alone pieces, he records, underwent a subtle change whenever the artist was at work ...”

“... a constant feature of those years, even decades. His life was one continuing round of obstinacy, self-conceit, sexual frustration, shyness and crises of faith. Then in 1902 he met and married Ada Vilstrup, and adopted the name Nolde from his native village; he and Ada moved to the Baltic island of Alsen; in 1904 he had his first solo exhibitions, in Leipzig ...”

“... to admire the West from a tender age do not hesitate to defend the motherland in debates with self-righteous Westerners. They have no qualms calling for boycotts of companies or individuals who behave in a manner ‘insulting’ to Chinese culture. Career choice distinguishes urban millennials from other generations: they are exceptionally ...”

“... writers over this period is a consequence of long-term intertextuality’. In stressing the self-contained nature of European knowledge production and its rootedness in a discursive tradition, Malcolm lands not so far from Said.New knowledge certainly entered an existing intellectual and social system, and was filtered through political and religious ...”

“... they should have anticipated the attacks. An outspoken juror dismissed all that as shoddy self-delusion: ‘This is Monday-morning quarterbacking.’ Foden is similarly reluctant to offer any last-ditch explanations. By and large, Zanzibar is too alert and understated to try to be wise after the event. Foden’s first novel, The Last King of ...”

“... commercial enterprises founded by imperially minded Scots were increasingly swallowed up by the self-same global economy they had once helped to promote. Thus Coats textiles still keeps its headquarters in Glasgow, but 80 per cent of its profits now come from thirty developing countries. ‘We follow growth,’ its chairman made clear in 1981: ‘our ...”

“... in his choice of what to study: pea plants are easy to raise and can be both out-crossed or self-fertilised, and he chose to study only characters – wrinkled v. round peas, for example – that are discrete and not likely to grade into each other. But he was lucky as well. When looking at pairs of characters – wrinkled/round and yellow/green, for ...”

“... she hides what she knows, like everyone else in the novel. Bad servants, like the irrepressibly self-interested Afy (short for Aphrodite) Hallijohn, imitate their employers; inadequate employers might end up as servants themselves. The categories shift and waver even as Wood insists on their fixity. Socially mobile Victorians, dogged by ...”

“... agreed to be the most French and the most rural of geniuses. In 1940 he constructed a solid self-portrait from blocky patches of earthy colours. He also adopted Cézanne’s two great subjects: fruit on a simple table with cloth in mountainous profile behind, and trees with branches that lock into the pattern of distant fields and rocky ...”

“... Down, died in 1962 of plague caught at work. Plague in the 21st century is a shadow of its former self. As a pandemic threat it has been replaced by influenza (which needs neither rats nor fleas) and as a microbial killer by HIV (which needs only unprotected sex). It is much more of a threat to prairie dogs than to people, and is in essence a rarity, with ...”

“... When he called himself a radical, it was not insincere, and many of his instincts set him against self-sustaining structures of power and authority. ‘Let us bust open the patronage and privilege by which both Socialists and Tories manipulate our politics and maintain their rigid out-of-date party structure,’ he declared in 1958. He believed in a ...”

“... other lore?’ By the end of her exhaustive chronicle of local history and legend the answer is self-evident: ‘Why is the Hudson Valley haunted? Perhaps a better question after all is: how on earth could it not be?’ Until I read this book, the Hudson Valley seemed remote from anguished, obviously possessed sites like ravaged towns in Mississippi and ...”