“... appearance of his palaces and princesses – but it comes to seem a permissible fault. And he is self-conscious. In his ‘Translator’s Preface’, McKane declares: ‘The translator is like a pane of glass through which one can glimpse the heart of the matter, not a mirror or reflection but a transparent film which should not hold up the eye.’ He falls ...”

“... soul’ is ‘less likely than ever to recover radical innocence and learn at last/that it is self-delighting’. Anxiety and dread mount as the poem progresses. It adds to this effect that almost every stanza cites an official formula, an order or instruction of some kind: ‘Stop Ahead’; ‘Out of Order’; ‘Please Examine Your Change’; ‘Please ...”

“... be preserved, catalogued and made accessible in its “born digital format”’. But Fletcher, a self-confessed devotee of Conrad, wonders whether digital materials have the same value as manuscripts. ‘Towards the end of Conrad’s life,’ Fletcher says, ‘he was much preoccupied with selling his manuscripts to T.J. Wise – and endorsing them (at ...”

“... that Law himself is responsible. It’s also possible that the virus is a spontaneous flaw in the self-regenerating code. The first to fall victim are those on the international dateline, before the contamination spreads steadily westward as the earth spins into it. The process is nicely described: It begins in small ways, in the smallest hours, when there ...”

“... within as well as imposed from without. Interiors – the inner life of the home, but also of the self – are not outside history but places where history is made. This was literally brought home to me, as it usually is to the bereaved, when so many of my household habits no longer made any sense. It seemed as if the whole house had to be reincarnated, lived ...”

“... corporations in Nitassinan as ‘colonialism’. In the early days of colonialism, as part of the self-justifying process of presenting subjugated races as inferior, eager scientists, intrepid explorers, shameless promoters and greedy businessmen – often one and the same person – found common interest in coercing or bribing ‘exotic’ natives to be put ...”

“... The wacky Terry-Thomas fatuity of ‘Self-Portrait with a Speedboat’, a four-page monologue, a cross between Formula One and Those Magnificent Men, that seems to be a kind of revenge on television, on years of watching sponsored sporting drivel: The three of us hit the Guinness hairpin at about ...”

“... itself, do heavy analytical duty. Clark seems to think that as terms of explanation they are self-evident. Equally irritating are the sneering descriptions of individuals he dislikes or comes to dislike. In the fifth volume, for example, Alfred Deakin, one of the founding fathers of federal Australia and an early prime minister, is Deakin in the first ...”

“... day when, as a boy fighting in the Russian Civil War, he killed (or thought he killed) a man in self-defence. The man was blond and handsome, on a beautiful white horse; the narrator was tired and ugly, riding a black nag. (Gazdanov’s protagonists often shared his characteristics. His fellow émigré Vasily Yanovsky described him as ‘a stocky fellow ...”

“... the quid pro quo for continued financial aid from Israel and the West and the trappings of self-government. As a consequence the PA is limited to using the prospect of ICC membership to gain leverage in what most Palestinians believe to be fruitless negotiations, rather than as a genuine means of achieving redress. In July Hanan Ashrawi, a senior ...”

“... it, but in his search discovers that the bomb is merely a metaphor symbolising his own fuming self. In the final scene, he jumps into the Hudson and drowns; the city is saved. Metaphysics, if it can be defined at all, is highbrow gimmickry, while genre literature was until recently the lowest of the low. For writers they represent two opposing drives: the ...”

“... of her working days, her pursuit of fame, had made her inflexible: she was eccentric, implacable, self-absorbed. Love, which calls for compliance, resilience, lavishness, would be a shock to her spirit, an upset to the rhythm of her days. She would never achieve it, he was sure. For all the love in her books, it would be beyond her in her life. For years ...”

“... head round it. Words themselves failed me.’ Aubenas largely removes her ‘real’, middle-class self from the narrative, while Toynbee and Ehrenreich reflect often and effectively on the contrast between their normal lives and their temporary ones. When Toynbee, who has spent years rubbing shoulders with the political elite, found herself working at the ...”

“... drawn from the everyday world; and both of them could argue their interlocutors into hopeless self-contradiction. For Kurke, acknowledging Aesop’s presence in early Greek thought gives us a better sense of the literary and social tensions in the prose that survives from that era. It is a historical truism that we see the past principally through the ...”

“... a Voltaire quality, and penetrating human stupidity with a sort of ghoulish gusto’. But this self-glorifying irony will be familiar to anyone who knows the column’s style. And neither the critics nor the Abbey audiences seem to have agreed with him. It’s good to have the play back in print, and it’s good to have it sitting alongside so many rare ...”