“... of Communist rule. Though he does trace the events that brought Mamata Banerjee (a ‘mistress of self-destruction’) to power, he is an unconvincing beat reporter. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. His narrative trips back and forth: from England, where he teaches, to Bombay, where he grew up; from the 1940s to 2011 and back again. The minutiae of his own ...”

“... the boundaries between rationality and superstition goes back to Horace Walpole’s sober and self-conscious preface to The Castle of Otranto, which suggests that the spooky manuscript was composed by a priest ‘to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions’. Soviet Gothic writers took aim at superstitions that were distinctly ...”

“... to questions is no longer revolutionary. That’s why these demonstrations have no leaders and are self-disciplined. Everyone is equal.’ Where the Tunisian revolution goes from here is unclear. Three days of protests finally persuaded Mohamed Ghannouchi, who served for 12 years as prime minister under Ben-Ali, to resign on 27 February. Six other ministers ...”

“... will have cut that figure even further. In 1980, a vast number of white unskilled workers and the self-employed moved over to Reagan, a trend that has been consolidated since. The main shift in the other direction has been of professionals and managers and liberal Protestants (often the same people) to the Democrats. By the 1990s, the Democrats were getting ...”

“... and non-EU students because it cannot control the numbers coming from Eastern Europe. That is a self-defeating and foolish policy which Labour should leave alone. It has always exaggerated the significance of immigration as a political issue and, as with crime, it will never trump the Tories in any case. The only way immigration can really be regulated is ...”

“... ambivalent: TV Buddha could be read as an image of the Zen concept of satori, in which the true self is seen without the interference of the intellect. He believed that new media had the potential to expand consciousness, and his works from the 1970s suggest a serious-absurd relationship between technology and the natural world. They seem to say that the ...”

“... to work with others and to be validated with and by them. ‘I’ve always struggled with self-esteem. I tried arguing with it, but I couldn’t hide from the support and the care that was there.’ At the end of the course students from Learning Together gave him a legal dictionary, and after he left Grendon one of the staff members visited him in ...”

“... Book in its entirety! If you attend to it intently, your daily comportment will no doubt become self-possessed . . . your heart will acquire natural gracefulness, and when you compose poems about the moon and the flowers, they will be imbued with feeling.The gist is: Shonagon is hot and/or marriageable. Be clever with words, like her!In the Meiji period ...”

“... scattered throughout the Middle East: studio portraits in Mr Five Per Cent show the different self-stylings of Ottoman elites, from stiff European outfits to Arabian robes. For centuries Armenians and other ethnic groups under Ottoman rule had enjoyed certain protections and privileges, including religious freedom. These groups, or millets, were ...”

“... in the mystic pungence of Negro mammies’. At times, the degree to which she has built her self-worth on her race and lineage is mocked. She uses her family name to justify her drinking and wanton romancing: ‘She’s the wildest one of the Beggs, but she’s a thoroughbred.’ Elsewhere, Zelda lapses into uninflected Southern ...”

“... like my other geese. He was himself: distinctive, intelligent, resourceful, congenial, loyal, self-sufficient when I was away, dependent when I was at home, healthy, able to defend himself against the other geese, knowing when to fight and when to give them a wide berth. And he could summon a sharp defence against humans too. I recall with such pleasure ...”

“... for this, as I suggested in the LRB at the time (23 February 2012), was at best weak and at worst self-defeating. After six years as a judge – and, going by some of his judgments, a good judge too – he has returned to the theme of the deference owed by law to politics. It is his bad luck to have done so at a moment when the UK’s political process, both ...”

“... novels, presents rape as a therapeutic solution to female frigidity. In 2014, the novelist (and self-identified Vonnegut fan) Kathleen Founds wrote, in a piece for Buzzfeed, that the story embraces ‘the myth that a woman who dresses provocatively shouldn’t be surprised if a man forces her to have sex. The myth that women unconsciously desire to be ...”

“... other places. Later she seems to become disenchanted with this work: not only does her high-minded self-sacrifice come up against the grubby equivocations of real politics (she may have inadvertently helped Tito’s partisans locate a village where they massacred the inhabitants), she also realises that she’s left her children at the mercy of malevolent ...”

“... fought doggedly on the Spartan side, ‘precisely because Sparta favoured their oligarchic mode of self-government and was likely to be willing to help defend it,’ as Cartledge writes. After Sparta’s victory in 404, Thebes, along with Corinth, is said to have demanded the total destruction of Athens – both cities would have gained enormously from the ...”